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Web 2.0 - Power to the People
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Thursday, November 9, 2006
4:47:00 PM EST
It's day three of Web 2.0, and things are just as packed as they were on Tuesday. I'm currently sitting on the floor inside the "grand ballroom" due to a lack of seats, and watching a discussion on Web 2.0 startups (including AOL/Weblogs' own Jason Calcanis) wrap up. It's actually easier to type sitting on the floor with my computer on my lap than on my knees anyway, so I'm quite happy doing this.Next up is a session on collective intelligence, which is really the reason why I'm inside the room now, I'm really interested to hear what they have to say. (Not that I'm not interested in startups, but I can't really call AOL a startup, although we're trying to harness that "startup mentality" these days).
The session began with a description of collective intelligence - how it's all about "harnessing the power of the masses." Making applications that use the data our users (that's you) give us to make them better. Netscape, Digg, Slashdot - those are all great examples of collective intelligence (Kevin Rose will be speaking later, the title of his discussion is "what Digg knows.").
Speaking on the panel were Owen VanNatta, (Facebook), Jim Buckmaster (Craig's List), Tony Schneider (Wordpress) and Richard Rosenblatt (formerly MySpace, now Demand Media).
First up was Craig's List, the question being how do they manage to do "so much with so few employees." Jim's response was, really, the response he always gives - that they rely on their users to do a lot of the "work" on the site, from reporting bad users, to helping other users, to spreading the word about the site. They also listen to the feedback from their users (as do we!), an example of this being that they don't run ads on the site because 'the users haven't asked for it.' Um. Would anyone ever ASK for ads?
Richard Rosenblatt spoke to the power of user-generated content. How a site, in and of itself, does not need to create tons of content - the people using the site will do that for them, and then generate the pageviews. Based on the description of Demand Media, it sounds like it's based on more of the "long-tail" of user generated content - his example was a new site they're working on that's all about hiking. The users should be able to determine what kind of content they're interested in, instead of the site. The tools should be generic, which gets back to the "make a platform not a site" idea that everyone was discussing the first day of the conference.
Wordpress is an open source product, and was definately built from the ground up to harness the power of the masses. Anyone can develop anything for Wordpress, and that's helped it grow. I think this becoming more of the standard...if things aren't actually open source, they're at least including a plugin-type infrastructure (like AIM), so anyone can create anything for it.
Owen was asked about how the "word on the street is that people are moving from MySpace to facebook." He said that they definately listen to their users' feedback, pointing directly to the buddy update type functionality they'd launched (then modified) after users' didn't like a lot of the information that was being exposed via the feed.
Interesting thing - Wordpress is having their users translate their site for them, instead of using professional translators. They check the actual translations once they're live, but they're able to launch international versions faster this way than going through the timely internationalization process that most companies have to go through. It's also allowed them to have blogs in a lot of other countries thanthey ordinarily would be able to go into - Latvia was a great example (AOL Latvia? Never say never..).
Amazon, of course, lets users create their own stores, share lists, and has always benefited from the intelligence of the masses. They also have always had a very strong recommendation engine that runs off of the "friends of friends" model.
A question was asked whether or not user generated content is different than collective intelligence. User generated content is just content of the masses, things like websites, pictures, the like. Collective intelligence is using the INTELLIGENCE, the brains of the masses to expand upon the site. Facebook - not really? a site like that can have collective intelligence tool.
My new favorite folks from Sphere asked a question about users shaping the content - are site product people just a funnel for users, or shaping the content. The response was that it's really up to the sites to make the best tools, make a structured format that the users' can then take and make whatever they want. We all still have a long way to go to figure out how to best use what we're given, but we can do it. It's all about giving the users' control.
If the content from this session sounded a little repetitive, it should. AOL's new strategy fully support what people talked about here - user generated content is key, listen to the intelligence of your masses, and your site/company will fail if you don't give people what they want.
I'm really, really excited that this whole thing is just confirming AOL's larger strategy, and you'll be seeing more and more products in the future that allow you to customize your stuff more and more.
Technorati tags: BamBam, Craig's List, facebook, Web 2.0, Web2.0 Summit, WordPress
Written by stephaniebambam Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | 
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4:47:00 PM EST
Web 2.0 - Power to the People
The session began with a description of collective intelligence - how it's all about "harnessing the power of the masses." Making applications that use the data our users (that's you) give us to make them better. Netscape, Digg, Slashdot - those are all great examples of collective intelligence (Kevin Rose will be speaking later, the title of his discussion is "what Digg knows.").
Speaking on the panel were Owen VanNatta, (Facebook), Jim Buckmaster (Craig's List), Tony Schneider (Wordpress) and Richard Rosenblatt (formerly MySpace, now Demand Media).
First up was Craig's List, the question being how do they manage to do "so much with so few employees." Jim's response was, really, the response he always gives - that they rely on their users to do a lot of the "work" on the site, from reporting bad users, to helping other users, to spreading the word about the site. They also listen to the feedback from their users (as do we!), an example of this being that they don't run ads on the site because 'the users haven't asked for it.' Um. Would anyone ever ASK for ads?
Richard Rosenblatt spoke to the power of user-generated content. How a site, in and of itself, does not need to create tons of content - the people using the site will do that for them, and then generate the pageviews. Based on the description of Demand Media, it sounds like it's based on more of the "long-tail" of user generated content - his example was a new site they're working on that's all about hiking. The users should be able to determine what kind of content they're interested in, instead of the site. The tools should be generic, which gets back to the "make a platform not a site" idea that everyone was discussing the first day of the conference.
Wordpress is an open source product, and was definately built from the ground up to harness the power of the masses. Anyone can develop anything for Wordpress, and that's helped it grow. I think this becoming more of the standard...if things aren't actually open source, they're at least including a plugin-type infrastructure (like AIM), so anyone can create anything for it.
Owen was asked about how the "word on the street is that people are moving from MySpace to facebook." He said that they definately listen to their users' feedback, pointing directly to the buddy update type functionality they'd launched (then modified) after users' didn't like a lot of the information that was being exposed via the feed.
Interesting thing - Wordpress is having their users translate their site for them, instead of using professional translators. They check the actual translations once they're live, but they're able to launch international versions faster this way than going through the timely internationalization process that most companies have to go through. It's also allowed them to have blogs in a lot of other countries thanthey ordinarily would be able to go into - Latvia was a great example (AOL Latvia? Never say never..).
Amazon, of course, lets users create their own stores, share lists, and has always benefited from the intelligence of the masses. They also have always had a very strong recommendation engine that runs off of the "friends of friends" model.
A question was asked whether or not user generated content is different than collective intelligence. User generated content is just content of the masses, things like websites, pictures, the like. Collective intelligence is using the INTELLIGENCE, the brains of the masses to expand upon the site. Facebook - not really? a site like that can have collective intelligence tool.
My new favorite folks from Sphere asked a question about users shaping the content - are site product people just a funnel for users, or shaping the content. The response was that it's really up to the sites to make the best tools, make a structured format that the users' can then take and make whatever they want. We all still have a long way to go to figure out how to best use what we're given, but we can do it. It's all about giving the users' control.
If the content from this session sounded a little repetitive, it should. AOL's new strategy fully support what people talked about here - user generated content is key, listen to the intelligence of your masses, and your site/company will fail if you don't give people what they want.
I'm really, really excited that this whole thing is just confirming AOL's larger strategy, and you'll be seeing more and more products in the future that allow you to customize your stuff more and more.
Technorati tags: BamBam, Craig's List, facebook, Web 2.0, Web2.0 Summit, WordPress
Written by stephaniebambam Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
