Because New York Geek Girls are Where Its At...
CNET Reporter and nextNY Caroline McCarthy is trailing in ValleyWag's VLog TechBabe Contest.
Show some NYC pride and vote for the hometown girl! She's only a hundred or so votes behind, so a big push from this blog should put her over the top.
LinkedIn adds easy search for webmail... Upload your Gmail contacts and connect
More LinkedIn fanboy action at TIGTTB... Now I can just login with my Gmail account and easily connect with all my blog friends. My comment notifications and nextNY listserv e-mails all get sent to Gmail so a lot of my contacts are sitting over there. Every service should have this... death to CSV files!
links for 2007-02-25
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So I asked myself what the strength of a radio station is and the answer’s apparent: promotion. A station can drive a sizable audience to something new online.
I just spent entirely too much money on tickets to the Police at Giants Stadium
I guess its one of those things you have to amortize over a lifetime of just being able to say that I saw them, though... like when Sting dies 30 years from how or whenever... I can tell my kids that I saw the Police play live. I'll also be able to tell them that I saw the Stones, too, but that would be that big a deal b/c they'll still be touring then.
Who knew this guy would be a trendsetter?? I don't remember this in the Tipping Point...
A while back, I posted a blurry picture of a older guy with a huge safety pin sticking out of his collar, and tried to come up with some kind of explanation for it. I think it was one of my funniest posts ever, but maybe my humor isn't for everyone.
Well, it turns out that safety pins in clothing are now the hottest thing.
Who knew one old dude on a train could touch off a fashion phenomena?
Non-commerical use? Yeah, right....who's going to stop me?
There's a lot of talk out there about freemium, premium, etc... but what about products where you have one market that gains real economic value from usage, and another market segment that you really want using it that gains none? Can you offer the same exact product to two different classes of users and simply say that one group has to pay and the other gets it free, and expect no cheating?
That's what "Non commercial use only" implies. There are many examples of software out there that you're supposed to pay for if you're a business, but if you're a person, you can get it for free.
The question is how to enforce that and how many users slip one past the goalie and get away with it? Are most people honest? How do you enforce that?
There's a lot of open source stuff out there that works in this manner, and I'd be curious to see research or first hand accounts of management of this... and potential for "cheating". I mean, are developers and users of open source code just a more respectful and sophisticated class of users?
Could this work if MySpace adopted this model? I think MySpace's issue is that the little guys, like my local pool hall, would be hardpressed to pay thousands of dollars for their page... but what if there was a way to set appropriate pricing... that they had to pay 5 bucks a month for their page. Could you enforce that?
Going to SXSW
Just FYI, I'll be heading to SXSW Interactive on the weekend of March 9th.
It looks like I'll be arriving late Friday night and staying through Monday.
If anyone wants to meet up, let me know... I've set up a wiki page for me to keep track of what I'm going to... I'll add more as I get closer. Please feel free to add your name if you want to meet up. The password is fordham. Does anyone know when they're actually going to post the times of these workshops? Do they run all morning in tracks repeatedly or are they just given once?
Thoughts about CommunityNext and Conferences on Social Media in General: Is passion for community a requirement?
I've been remiss in writing my follow up post to CommunityNext. First off, Noah Kagan did a fantastic job organizing this. He had great speakers and the whole thing went off like clockwork, especially considering the ambitious schedule.
The tough thing for me, though, was that I didn't quite get who the audience was. I hung out with Fred and Brian (who treated us to bar substinance, btw... very sneakily, too... never got a chance to thank him), saw Stephanie... Tara spoke, and got to meet Anastasia and Frank... and then I thought to myself... Why are we all here? I mean, are we all preaching to the choir?
Tara wrote in her post conference notes, "The audience, I guestimated, was more than half filled with people who were asking the question, “How can I use community to make money?”
I have to admit, I didn't run into many, or any of these people for that matter. Unlucky Tara.
Or maybe I'm just looking at these people differently. Hell, maybe I'm one of them. There are a lot of people out there who work for businesses that maintain communities.... so I guess they are "using communities to make money" or put another way, "are in the business of providing services that include communities". Sounds a little bit different depending on the word choice and order, doesn't it?
To use another example, would you rather monetize a community or create a sustainable community... because last I checked, its hard to sustain a community, grow and innovate without some dough. Even Wikipedia is asking for money. No one calls it monetizing, but that's essentially what they're doing...getting money from users.
And, that's just fine. In fact, its more than fine. Its fantastic that people are asking "How do I make money?" Because, what is implied is that they're really asking, "How do I make money without totally pissing off all my users and having them disappear in a year?"
The way I see it, with no real barriers to entry and hardly any switching costs, in a wide open web, the big bad corporations and money makers should actually be aligned with users, no? No users, no money. More users, more money. Get users by making something people want to use. People are not idiots, they will only use useful stuff.
For all the MySpace bashing that went on at the conference and that I even do here, if MySpace didn't really provide any value to its users, it would cease to exist. They'd all move over to Hi5 or back to Friendster. A lot of the evangelists at CommunityNext cringe at the thought, but the reality is that it doesn't take passion to create community and it doesn't take care, concern, etc. I think the people at MySpace care about community to the extent that it is a monetary decision and that seems to be working for them.
Why? Because, you're not really creating community online. Community was there. People talked before blogs. They found music before last.fm. They had anonymous sex before Craigslist...um... I mean... bought each others couches, or whatever. There were garage sales before eBay. Granted, online tools allow better expression of community and more explosive growth... more robust information exchange, and more efficient communication... People are social animals... they started making the web social long before the term social software came out. In the end, all you really need is to put the tools of expression and connection in the hands of the people.
That's what MySpace did. They gave people big dumb empty boxes and allowed us to throw whatever crap we wanted in there. That's community. We threw our thongs, our middle fingers and our bling in there... and MySpace threw ads all over it. Do people care? They don't seem to.
Community? MySpace is the Mott Haven to the Soho of our rich Flickr Web 2.0 life, but, gasp all you want, they're both thriving web communities.
I think people are confusing passion for community with good product design. Do the people at last.fm have passion for community? I dunno... I don't know who they are or what they stand for, but the product rocks. AIM, Skype... Good products. Passionate communities? umm... On the other side, a lot of people fail at community because their product just sort of sucks... its not because they lack passion.
Or look at what I'm up against in my area. IAC has used paid advertising to get over 4 million people to register for the Zwinky avatars, which come with a lovely Ask.com search toolbar that installs itself all over your system. Long after you abandon your Zwinky, the toolbar remains, generating search revenue for the company. That kind of behavior should lead to a massive revolt by their community, no? No... people continue to click and register everyday.
Show me a fantastic social product that went nowhere because the founders lacked passion for community.
I guess what I'm saying is, while passionate founders and community caretakers definitely instill an authenticity and quality to their community...think Craigslist, Vimeo, etc...that hasn't shown itself to be a requirement, nor, unfortunately, an advantage. Hopefully, though, when Voki arrives in March, we will use our passion to our advantage and you will see it in our usage, our content and in our marketing...and in the product itself.
Flixster does viral right.... but what about the product?
If anyone wants to learn a little something about online viral apps, walk through Flixter.
First, I got a message from someone who accidently uploaded their whole address book and sent invites to take a movie quiz. Loving movies, I signed up and took the quiz, but the whole while, it made a big point of getting me to invite my friends, and then it had me paste a MySpace bulletin as well as a widget in my MySpace movies section... automatically.
Plus, smartly, it tells me when friends of mine have answered my quiz and coaxes me to go online and see how we match up.
Admittedly, I haven't gotten into much of the depth of the product.... I'm not sure they've developed enough hooks yet to pull users deeper into the system to encourage more movie ratings, but that will come in time as they grow their community. For now, I can see how this is going to grow like a weed.
Of course, I'm ceonyc on there, too...