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Re: Why I don't like Riffs

lawrence coburn — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 20:51:07 -0000

I really like Riffs' design and concept. I absolutely love their Nav bar. Besides the "conversation" point made above, centralization provides a built in audience - perhaps the single most important incentive in causing regular people to leave a review.

Where Riffs will struggle is in accumulating content. By virtue of their scope (everything), they will be spread exceedingly thin. To fill out this massive skeleton, they will need more than the savvy blogging community writing a review or two - they will need to appeal to the mainstream.

And my initial take is that the precise reason that this site will appeal to the super savvy (tagging, rss, etc), is also the reason that the more mainstream will be left scratching their heads.

Re: A Profile of Tagworld

lawrence coburn — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:40:28 -0000

I was disappointed to see that Tagworld is spamming people. I got an invite from a pretty girl named "carrie," who unfortunately i don't know, with a bulk email address.

Re: TagWorld Launches Music. The War Begins.

lawrence coburn — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 15:48:43 -0000

While it seems like they've put together some nice tools and I love that they're thinking big, I think it deserves mention that Tagworld is actively spamming.

I've received 6 bogus "invites" from the profile of some pretty girl (that sadly, I don't know).

If the founders are reading this, I'd love to hear their thought process behind using a spam campaign in support of a site that is trying to be legit.

Re: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn't Live Without

lawrence coburn — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 12:07:04 -0000

Interesting comment on Pandora - I would agree with the poster that says there is very little about them that is 2.0.

That being said, I love the service. It's incredibly easy to use, and cranks out some really surprising recommendations. If they can pay experts to dissect every song in the world and still make their business model work, more power to them.

Just a reminder that collective wisdom / tagging is not the ONLY way to deliver a superior service.

Re: More Edge Reviews - iNods

lawrence coburn — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:33:40 -0000

Mike, I agree there is value in the scraper model - grabbing content from other sites and packaging it in a way that adds value.

But your assertion that...

"There is no way centralized review sites like Yelp, Riffs, Judy’s Book and others can compete with the blogosphere over the long run..."

...assumes that the blogging format is going to be not just A winner in the user generated content space, but the ONLY winner.

I disagree wholeheartedly.

I would point to the success of centralized, destination Web sites such as MySpace, Craigslist, wikipedia, etc as evidence that people LIKE congregating online where other people are.

Centralized, destination Web sites provide a conversation, they provide an audience, they provide reputation systems and trust systems, and more.

The blogging format works very well for some - but not everyone has the time, passion, and dedication to manage the consistent commitment that a blog entails.

For the rest of us who choose not to blog, online communities such as Yelp and Judy's Book offer a convenient, lightweight alternative to blogging.

For scraping to continue to be a viable model, at least some destination sites will need to survive, or else there will be nothing left to scrape - unless you really think that blogs are destined to be the only user generated content format left standing.

Re: More Edge Reviews - iNods

lawrence coburn — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 21:12:44 -0000

Yeah, after a while the definitions (blog, wiki, forum) tend to overlap and blur a bit.

I'd say that MySpace is more a collection of profiles, than it is of blogs. But let's say that you could subscribe to any Yelp reviewer via RSS? I know that you can do that on Riffs, for example as well as on a few other review sites. Would't that make those sites "blogs" too, and therefore not guilty of the centralized content label?

We may just be disagreeing on terminology. I can't imagine that Yelp isn't going to enable RSS feeds of its reviewers. I guess where I'm losing you is this: Yelp aggregates all these individual publishers under the umbrella of a centralized review site. Blogger aggregates (with walls between blogs) a bunch of individual publishers under the umbrella of a blog site. Assuming both offer RSS feeds, how is Yelp any different than Blogger, besides the fact that they enable collaboration between reviewers?

Re: More Edge Reviews - iNods

lawrence coburn — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:31:26 -0000

Mike, just to answer your question about what happens when Yelp starts blocking iNods from scraping their content, I guess I'd say that I understand where Craig is coming from.

Anyone who has ever had anything to do with an online community knows that it's all about creating an environment where "sheep sh$t grass." Where it's a give and take - members of the community contributing, and those same members benefiting from those contributions. The more freeloaders, the more the community becomes at risk.

So with craigslist, they had built this incredible community where site visitors act like owners. This sense of community has allowed craiglist to become an web institution and to rock the newspapers industry to its foundations.

Along comes Oodle, a (venture funded, for profit) business whose goal it is to make it easier for visitors to TAKE from craiglist. Yes they send traffic, but in the process they essentially transactionalize Craigslist - stripping away the community aspect, and condensing craigslist to a quick way to buy your bike, ticket, and move on to the next thing.

I know exactly where the craigslist guys were coming from when they told Oodle to shove it. By attempting to transactionalize / commoditize the craigslist service, Oodle is endangering that which makes craigslist unique - its "sheep that sh$t grass," its community give & take.

I love openness, but it seems that those that are the most enthusiastic about it are those who would be takers, and ignore or marginalize the giving part.

I don't know if Yelp will ever block iNods from scraping its content and making money off that content, but whatever they decide to, I would imagine that they will take a careful look at what iNods brings to the Yelp community, as it's clear what they would be taking.

Re: More Edge Reviews - iNods

lawrence coburn — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:14:04 -0000

One more business model type comment:

I think there is an opportunity / need for sites like iNods to come up with something creative about their business relationships with the sites that they are scraping.

While Google can pull off the "let our bots hammer your site, and we'll send you traffic" contract with Webmasters - because they control 70% of search traffic, I don't think this gives a carte blanche to every other scraper out there.

For example, it's just not appealing to me as someone who runs an online community to let every spider in to drive our bandwidth up and "borrow" our community's content. It makes it even tougher to swallow that these scrapers/aggregators then look to skim advertising revenue off that content, before (maybe) sending (the least profitable) traffic back... as another poster mentioned, seems like a bit of a conflict to me, and an area where there exists the opportunity for some creative thinking around how to structure a relationship in which both the scraper and the scraped community benefit.

Re: The Gather.com Issue

lawrence coburn — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 13:01:47 -0000

I don't really understand the 23 people and $7M in funding either. Unless 18 of those folks are dedicated to direct ad sales, this sort of business just doesn't justify this overhead IMHO.

But I guess I'll break from the crowd and say that I think it's a neat concept. I don't see it as just another blogging platform. The focus is more on the article than the blog - which makes it more collaborative. As a reader you might go to Gather to check out recent articles from a number of your favorite authors - a subtle difference from going to a blog to check out recent posts from a blogger. Not quite a wiki, but closer.

And as far as the revenue sharing - say what you want, but these guys are still ahead of the curve. How many Web 2.0 sites are giving back to their contributors? And unlike the blog networks, Gather's writers are not handpicked superstar bloggers - they're anybody.

I think it's only a matter of time before ALL sites that rely on user-generated content will have to share the profits.

Re: CollectiveX is better than LinkedIn

lawrence coburn — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 13:44:17 -0000

This service doesn't really sound like a social networking site at all.

This sounds more more like an advanced version of Basecamp than it sounds like a LinkedIn competitor.

If it is trying to play in the social networking space, I would agree with each of Manav's excellent questions above.

Re: Otavo To Launch in May

lawrence coburn — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 02:33:28 -0000

Sort of like Rollyo for social bookmarks?

Re: Squidoo: Seth Godin's Purple Albatross?

lawrence coburn — Tue, 09 May 2006 16:29:38 -0000

I just got a payment of $0.10 from Squidoo for my two lenses (san francisco basketball, san francisco burritos), and symbolically, I think that payment is important. I would be surprised if Squidoo's early adopters aren't inspired to do more by the arrival of a payment - even if that payment is tiny.

I see Squidoo as an alternative blogging platform. It was never meant to appeal to the professional blogger crowd, so to judge it on those terms is unfair.

And let's face it - what the web 2.0 crowd thinks of these services is at best unimportant, and at worst misleading. Our collective tastes in Web services are completely out of whack with what the rest of the online population is consuming, as we should all know by now.

I'm not counting Squidoo out yet.

Re: 33 Places to Hangout in the Social Networking Era

lawrence coburn — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:27:46 -0000

Nice list Sid... here's a list of 57 social networking sites (with some overlap):

http://www.rateitall.com/t-...

Re: Distributed Revenue-Sharing Ad Platforms Are the Paradigm For Monetizing Social Media

lawrence coburn — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:48:29 -0000

Scott, I think there's a good case to made that by distributing revenue earning responsibility down to its members MySpace would increase the overall, aggregate earnings of all the individual profile properties.

However, the revenue that News Corp would see in this scenario would only be some subset - as those that "owned" the profiles would be taking home some of those ad dollars.

The site that I work for made the decision to distribute Adsense to our contributors (profile creators can earn 100% of the ad revenue from their profiles) and "give away" some of our revenues to our users, partly because we believe that the overall size of the pie would increase such that our net revenues would increase.

But in the case of MySpace, with their spectacular grown and utter dominance of the social networking space, do they need to share revenues? Is it really going to increase the size of the pie so much that their net revenues go up?

In an extreme example, let's say that MySpace decided to share their revenues 50/50 through some Adsense like program with those that were contributing content. In order for News Corp to maintain the same level of revenue, the total, aggregate earnings of all the individual MySpace profiles would have to double.

Even if you assume that individuals will be more effective in monetizing their own pages that News Corp (which is debatable), you would still need a massive increase in traffic to subsidize the revenue share. And is there that much more traffic that MySpace can be getting?

The bottom line is that I think that for the foreseeable future, revenue sharing will be a tactic of the "up and comers." The market leaders, like MySpace, won't do it because they don't have to. They're growing so fast without sharing revenue, that unless they're seriously pushed by another sns, there's no reason for them to share the loot.

Re: Distributed Revenue-Sharing Ad Platforms Are the Paradigm For Monetizing Social Media

lawrence coburn — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:18:49 -0000

Scott, you're preaching to the choir. Just to up the rhetoric a little bit, the "economies" of social networks right now are the equivalent of centralized planning in the former Soviet Union. A centralized agency (News Corp) is trying to set uniform prices (cpm) on something which is radically decentralized (profiles) and of wildly varying quality. A much more efficient market would emerge by freeing up the, uhhh, MySpace proletariat to get market value for their contributions.

Or something like that :)

My only hesitancy is that the obscene growth that MySpace is managing without revenue sharing makes it hard to imagine the numbers working out in News Corps favor with revenue sharing.

Yes, if they could increase CPM 5 fold (or even 2.1 fold assuming a 50/50 rev share), it would make all the sense in the world. To see this sort of jump, though, I think there would need to be a far more sophisticated selection of self-monetization tools (like Adsense) available to MySpace users. It could be that the self-earning infrastructure is just not there yet.

Re: The Users Will Decided Who Gets Their Content

lawrence coburn — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:11:50 -0000

This will be fascinating to watch play out.

If Netscape is able to poach some top users, and Digg suffers because of it, and Netscape gets some traction - the impact will be felt around the industry.

Then there really will be a reason for all of these user generated content sites to take VC money.

Re: Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?

lawrence coburn — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 20:20:04 -0000

I see the future, and it's not going to be pretty.

How many copycat user generated content sites have launched in the last 6 months? Thousands. How many of those sites are venture funded? Probably hundreds.

What do you think is going to happen when the vast majority of those start ups are struggling for traction and the vcs are cranking up the pressure?

Those start ups are going to whip out the check books just like Jason Calacanis did, and start giving away that VC cash at artificially high rates.

When everybody's paying (which they will be eventually), only then will we get an accurate view of who's service is best.

There's still a lot of lumps remaining for all of us as this whole Web 2.0 stuff starts coming back down to earth.

My only advice to those considering this pay model is to try and build revenue sharing into your busines model - ie, if the user's contribution is earning your site money, great, pay them. If it's not, don't.

Re: OthersOnline matches people by online interests

lawrence coburn — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 12:26:20 -0000

This is a StumbleUpon clone, right?

Re: Fanpop: an easy, fun way to share topical information

lawrence coburn — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 22:04:51 -0000

Nice, clean, fun site.

I'm surprised not to see any revenue sharing - or did I just miss it?

Re: Ramblings on ThisNext

lawrence coburn — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 14:24:04 -0000

The elephant in the room for ThisNext and their ilk is Amazon. Amazon owns the point of sale review which converts significantly higher than the destination site review.

They also own the world's biggest and most effective affiliate program - Amazon Associates.

How long do you think it would take Amazon to turn on a shopcast Widget powered by their MILLIONS of reviews? And hook it into a Amazon Associates to do rev sharing with the reviewer?

If this concept of social shopping shows any legs at all (which it might), Amazon is going to come in and kick everybody's ass.

Re: Answerbag bets the farm on widgets and an API

lawrence coburn — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:50:30 -0000

This is no tiny start up. Their parent, InfoSearch Media, is a real company with some cash. They are a pretty big player in the SEO / SEM / Content Writing space. Not surprising that they are looking to build a community content platfrom - it's a lot cheaper than hiring writers.

Re: Yelp secures $10 million more for local reviews

lawrence coburn — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:09:18 -0000

Congratulations to the Yelp guys. They've done an awesome job.

$16M in funding looks more like a telecom play than a user review play, but to be fair, Yelp's model is to really nail a city down - to have a local presence through feet on the street, parties, etc. It takes cash to do that on a national level - a lot of cash.

Re: WidgetCon – The Birth of an Unconference?

lawrence coburn — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:13:10 -0000

Hi guys, sounds like a great idea. I'd love to help out as well.

Re: WidgetCon - The Birth of an Unconference?

lawrence coburn — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:13:10 -0000

Hi guys, sounds like a great idea. I'd love to help out as well.

Re: Compete Takes On Alexa - Launches SnapShot and Social Search

lawrence coburn — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:03:14 -0000

Compete doesn't seem to skew towards sites with lots of techie users like Alexa... must be all that ISP data.

I think this is a nice development - it's hard to take Alexa seriously when we saw our Alexa rank triple on a day when we got 200 clicks from Mashable (against an overall traffic day of 25K visits.)