Commerce
Is it cool to be accessible?
Two posts that came together on the same riff but from different angles. Do communities scale?
First Danah Boyd on "coolness"
"Coolness" is about structural barriers, about the lack of universal accessibility or parsability. Structural hurdles mean people put in more effort to participate. It’s kinda like the adventure of tracking down the right parking lot to [...]
The Intention Economy - Pulling Demand from the Edge
I’m distilling my takeaways from this week’s eTech conference at, of all places, Disneyland. The vacation schedule of my son’s school afforded us a long weekend down here to the land of characters in big, overstuffed heads.
In such a commerce-driven atmosphere, you really begin to appreciate all the different ways that a machine like the [...]
TimesSelect Annual Revenues Nearly $5M
The New York Times announced that it has over 270,000 subscribers to it’s premium TimesSelect service. PaidContent does some back of the envelope calculations and calculates that they are pulling in $4,954,000 in annual revenue from this venture only 52 days after launch.
Spam Blogs and Financial Incentive
Technorati’s Niall Kennedy posts about the recent spate of spam blogs coming out of Google’s Blogger service and describes Google’s Blogger and Adsense service as parts of a spam suite. BoingBoing first posted Niall’s theory that CAPTCHA’s are no longer a valid block and are circumvented by spammers who redirect the test to eager seekers [...]
Product Blogs, a new business model
My colleague, Loic Le Meur, is interviewed by Shel Israel for their upcoming book on business blogging. Loic shares his story about a T-shirt fanatic who built a community of like-minded T-shirt fans via his blog. His site is now a business which turns the traditional “we-design, you-buy” commerce model inside out (sorry about the [...]
Charlie Wood, RSS as the Information Bus
I wonder how many out there have, upon reading Steve Jobs’ recent commencement address, have reconfigured their life to pursue their dreams. First Richard MacManus cited Jobs’ speech as inspiration. Now, Charlie Wood, VP of Enterprise Solutions of Newsgator, has left his job to start a new venture. Spanning Partners will offer RSS integration services [...]
nytimes.com surveys readers on $50/year subscription fee
The Wall Street Journal Online reports and BusinessWeek blogs that the New York Times is surveying its readers on two subscription plans that would move them away from their current $2.95/article pricing structure. One plan would offer unlimited access to the past year’s articles for $49.99 and the second would limit access to 100 articles/month [...]
Affiliate marketing offline browser
People always ask me how they can make money writing a blog. The question is like someone back in 1870, a few years after the invention of the telephone, asking how someone can make money dialing a telephone call. With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, it’s the message not the medium.
Interactive advertising is playing an dangerous [...]
Collective Loan Network
The internet is a wonderful catalyst for busting apart black boxes that mediate experience, knowledge, or commerce. My co-worker Sippey, points to Zopa, a UK exchange network which hooks up lenders to borrowers and, because there’s no middleman, takes only 1% as a fee. Their approach is fresh and they’ve got a few ideas on [...]
Dining with Yahoo
The folks at SFist write about their dinner with Yahoo where they get an insight into some of the economic shifts that are a result of the changes in the media landscape.
Greg pointed out that in the past, papers could depend on classified
ads accounting for up to 35% of their revenue. Now they’re lucky if [...]
