In this interview with Robert Scoble, Ripple6 founder Sang Kim talks about what his company has learned from trial and error since the community management system launched under the name Mom Junction in 2007. He discusses how to create what he calls “cloud communities,” how to scale them and how to reward and engage community members.
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: Unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009)
As founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos defined online shopping and rewrote the rules of commerce, ushering in a new era in business. Time magazine named him Man of the Year in 1999. The dot-com boom and bust Bezos led is often compared to the Gold Rush. But Jeff says it’s more like the early days of the electric industry.
Kevin Kelly, exec editor at WIRED and founder of visionary nonprofits, shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?
Law professor Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they’re paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants.
Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.
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There is an interesting conversation going on this week between some of the web’s heavy hitters on the subject of the actual value of LinkedIn recommendations in the reputation economy.
Along with a tune up and a face lift, the latest release of Glue boasts some new features that heavy social media users are really going to find useful.
If you haven’t heard of Glue, it’s a browser add-on that allows you to carry your social network with you as you browse around the web and do a whole host of really cool things with social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Digg etc. Like Firebug or del.icio.us, it’s become an indispensable part of my browsing toolkit. I use it multiple times a day to quickly share articles and books I read, music I’m listening to, restaurant reviews I write etc. to Twitter and Facebook as I’m browsing. There’s a lot of power packed into this little add-on and, because it allows you to do so many things on so many platforms, it’s replaced quite a few of my single purpose add-ons. For it’s integration with Twitter and Facebook alone it’s worth installing, but the new social features they’ve added today are worthy of applause. Read More
Whether or not you chose to acknowledge it, your ability to sink or swim on the social web depends on how you participate, engage others and embrace the customs of the virtual gift economy – this is as true for individuals as it is for big brands who have a web presence.
The concepts of “FREE as a business model” and sustainable gift culture generally makes sense to people in the context of products, services, brands and community building, but the understanding sometimes breaks down when it’s mentioned in the context of individual relationships and social media. Seasoned vets know that there are a host of unwritten rules and customs for reciprocating that we should follow when we benefit from free content and receive help and advice from others on the web. I’ll discuss some of those rules, explain why they’re important and offer some ways to act on them below. Read More
Jesse Stay, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer recently posted some interesting and insightful pieces on how Twitter is going after people who game Twitter to get more followers. There are some solid arguments made in each post in support of Twitter’s move, as well as on the dubious and controversial nature of Twitter’s suggested users list (SUL). When it comes to the issue of eliminating spam and improving usability, I fundamentally support what Twitter is doing. That said, Dave Winer makes some excellent points on Twitter’s SUL. The three posts in tandem are great reads if you want to understand the core issues and what’s going on. There are also many gems in the comments.
The iPhone 3.0 upgrade software was just released and, within minutes, #iPhone and #iTunes popup on the trending topics list as the iPhone community rushes to their computers to upgrade their phones. Between the time I ran the search and took this screenshot, there were over 1000 new twitter posts mentioning #iTunes – literally in the space of a minute. Hundreds of people are all having similar problems, asking questions, helping each other. Amazing. And Apple is no where to be seen in the stream. Lesson learned…get your community manager and techies monitoring Twitter when someone pushes the “RELEASE” button. Read More
Google Trends is one of my favorite tools to come out of the Google Labs. While we data junkies are forced to envy people like Bill Tancer who have access to tons of rich, real time data about what’s going on on the web, Google Trends is the best thing that we can get for free, and it’s still very useful for basic analysis and research. In this post I’ll show you a few great ways you can use Google Trends to do research on the web like a pro and give you a quick list of hacks you can use to build your “Google Ninja” skills. Read More
