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Identity

There are starting to be building blocks for distributed identity, but you still have to put a lot of pieces together to get it to work.

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I was talking with Jude Yew today, a Ph.D. student at Michigan's School of Information. He's interested in facilitating learning via online forums and has been working with me on my learning blogosphere and learning remix projects. The conversation veered around a little, and we came to his idea of using threaded comments to blog posts to promote class interaction.

I won't go into what I think are the merits of that idea, but one of the key points that came up was identity. How do you consistently identify the commenters? Last November, Kaliya Hamlin and I had a conversation on that very topic, and she was convinced that establishing identity was key to community work.

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Bud posted this on May 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

In the Tail of the Long Tail

Blogging is about communicating with specific audiences. In and of itself, it is not really a commercial proposition.

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In January, I wrote a note regarding the long tail, in which I said the whole notion of people writing blogs to hit it big at the scale of mass media is crap. After completing the last formal session of a recent Web 2.0 Business Bootcamp at Michigan's Ross School of Business, I think that even more (see participant blogs aggregated here). Participants created blogging projects to communicate with other, well-defined groups of people. Some of them absolutely did not want to hit it big, but all were thrilled by interaction with a previously unknown audience. In other words, the motivation seemed to be primarily social and communicative.

So, how do you make this kind of activity economically sustainable? Research shows that attempts to monetize individual content through ads and other promotion make it less credible. People wonder if they aren't being spammed, and bloggers themselves feel the pressure to conform with the advertiser's wishes. That kills the advertising revenue model. The subscription model is also probably dead since it runs counter to a small-scale blogger's desire to be heard.

The remaining revenue model is ecommerce. Believe it or not, I suspect many bloggers are missing out on affinity products. Scoble has it somewhat with his Channel 9 guy, but what he really needs is a scobleizer t-shirt. Perhaps more in line with many bloggers self-perception, the other version of this opportunity is sales of professional services and other products such as online courses. So, maybe Dave Winer is right, blogging is really just advertising for the other stuff you do. Make money using your blog to sell that.

Bud posted this on February 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Mashups are more than just using big company data

There is a real mashup business model in providing infrastructure for people to create their own ad hoc mashups. I agree that, if you are basing your business plan on a creative way to redisplay some large company's data, heaven help you.

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A lot of perspectives on business opportunities for mashups are just too driven by the idea of using big company data. The real value-add in any information business is the information, hard to easily duplicate if the business is viable. So, of course, companies are not just going to give this away for you to generate revenue off of. Matthew Hurst and Greg Linden state this well:

On the other hand, the commercial examples are, as Greg points out, making offerings with no guarantees. In fact imagine the following example: data is made freely available; everyone throws in their idea; whenever a killer app emerges, the data is suddenly no longer free (I believe Alexa has been very open about this strategy). Now what do you do with your users?

There is no business model for mashups. If Web 2.0 really is just mashups, this is going to be one short revolution.

Is Web 2.0 Nothing More Than Mashups

Data Mining: Greg on Mashups

But I think this misses a larger point.

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Bud posted this on December 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Is Social Software a Mirror or a Lens?

Humorously, Liz Lawley's greatest contribution to this talk is to exclude everybody but the inner circle who is surrounding her.

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Liz Lawley is leading this. She notes that there is a tendency for people in the blogosphere to just hang out with birds of a feather. She also notes there is a core group that comes to all of these events and some new people. Liz is an absolute jerk by demanding that people who want to participate come to the front half of the auditorium. Hey, not my fault the auditorium is set up the way it is. Unimpressive and overly exclusive, paying to go to a conference and having someone tell you you are not part of their space.

Tina Sharkey and a guy (Joe ?) who used to run Friendster are also on the panel. Tina remarks that AOL wants to facilitate meta-social interaction (people figuring out how to interact and making connections vs. talking on topic). Joe remarks that people in different cultures use the services differently.

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Is Business Ready for Social Software

To achieve its highest value, social software has to exist outside of the corporation.

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Participants are: Stowe Boyd, Seth Goldstein, and Kaliya Hamlin. The central question seems to be why is business adopting social software now? Stowe Boyd thinks there is huge potential for businesses to transform themselves. My question is this: do existing institutions want to change? Or is it that new institutions will arise?

Seth Goldstein seems to think it is the API. How many people know about APIs? I don't know of any managers who are thinking about APIs. My wife who now uses social software does not know about APIs or any of the mash-ups they enable. She just likes to communicate. She also likes being able to look back on past conversations

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Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Ning

Ning might fill a sweet spot where non-programmer entrepreneurs can create applications for groups of people who want to interact with each other. That's the missing link in today's social software value proposition.

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I've been trying out Ning, which has been written about by many people. Ning is essentially a platform for creating interactive web apps. Here's one of them:

Ning

Dave Winer thinks it's a product that does not do anything original. I have a slightly different view. It's a product that has some potential if it can make developing and maintaining interactive web apps so easy that non-programmer community entrepreneurs can do it.

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Bud posted this on October 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)