My notes from tonight’s NYSIA panel on “Web 2.0: Wave of the Future”, in New York:

Web 2.0 Decoded—by Howard Greenstein

The slides for this presentation are at howardgreenstein.com .

Phrase coined by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly
Usually used to refer to a group or class of web sites/applications that exhibit certain properties

Is this really mass amateurization—or only the techies /early adopters acting in this fashion. (source : amateur.net)

Key diagram points:
- the web is the platform
- - you control your data
- -data is remixable
- - software as services, with interfaces to which others can attach
- Perpetual beta tests (e.g., gmail still says it’s ‘beta’
- Users are trusted allies
- Long tail phenomenon

‘web 2.0′ is a consumer version of real web services’

User-generated content (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags)

Social software—value of content increases as the number of users increases: last.fm, flickr, webjay, upcoming, social networks.

In an open ecosystem, best of breed survive
Openness vs. faux openness—you can put stuff in, but can you take it out. (That’s what AttentionMarkets/root is analyzing)

Openness and Sharing—data is not locked into a site. Get it with APIs. (COM(MS), Javabeans, SOAP

suprglu.com draws materials from about 25 tag-based sites

often built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python, and MySQL’—an ‘anyone but Microsoft’ or ‘open source’ heavy architecture

According to Joe Krause, it took $3m to launch Excite; a few hundred K to start Jotspot—and the two services have roughly the same number of users at the same point in their corporate lifespan.

Ruby—scripting framework for rapid development of code.

AJAX—Asynchronous JavaScript—makes webpage look like an application. Ironically started at MSFT. Examples: gmail, photo sorting in Flickr, windows live, My Google homepage drag and drop

Long tail:

The long tail of search is Adwords/ Overture

The long tail of content is micro-markets—not dozens of markets, but millions of markets of dozens of people.
Not a market of hits.

Naysayers : Web 2.0 isnt anything new.

Who is hit by Web 2.0:
- media magazines
- recruiters/dating cos.
- Real estate brokers/recruiters/classified ads

PANEL

Bob Wyman, cofounder and CTO, Pubsub
We think that the Pubsub model—the Net brings you back what you’re looking for—is a basic idea of web 2.0 . in web 1.0 we focused on the user’s needs; in web 2.0 we’re focused on the needs of the machines (e.g., better APIs).

Fred Wilson, Co-Founder and Partner, Union Square Ventures (leading Web 2.0 investor)
$125M fund

Joshua Schachter, Creator of del.icio.us, acquired by Yahoo!
Worked on Wall Street before being an entrepreneur. It’s a social system for sharing (for now) bookmarks. “Tags are the thing I invented by renaming keywords.” Founded 03.

Dennis Crowley, Founder of Dodgeball.com (recently purchased by Google)
“Friendster for mobile phones”. Founded 03.
“Technology that facilitates serendipity”
Now in 22 cities.
He teaches at NYU ITP: “Ubiquitous computing for mobile devices.”

PANEL

Greenstein: “What’s the big deal with Web 2.0?”

Crowley: Web 2.0 is a framework for users to provide content

Schachter: with $8/mo. Account, you can get a basic database and scripting going. He recently saw a drink index with tags (aka ‘ingredients’). Compare IMDB, CDDB.

Wilson: Web 2.0 is an oxymoron. Why? Because naming your software releases (1.0, 2.0, etc.) is the classic release mechanism, but it’s the antithesis of how Web 2.0 really works.

Wyman: in the 90s we went thru a period where technology came to a halt, and we focused on deployment. After the bubble, a dessert, but now we’re in innovation mode.
Lowering of entry costs. Broadening of minds.

Schachter: Web services are interesting because they allow people to build on top of things. He sees few new systems built on other’s APIs.

Crowley: Dodgeball has RSS out, but not APIs in.

Wilson: maybe it’s too late now to start or invest in a web 2.0 company. ‘We saw this movie and we know how it ends.’

Wyman: more people making smaller amounts of money. Lots of people are earning a living from adsense/affiliate programs on a service they built. It’s a good living for them, but someone’s service built on Flickr API is not a good investment for VCs. They’re building subsistence-level businesses.

Wyman: Thousands of people are earning $50-$250/month from their blogs, and Google is earning millions and laughing all the way to the bank.

Wilson: consumer-facing web services usually can’t be subscription-based

Schachter: I have a buddy who runs a forum which now earns enough $ to pay his mortgage. That’s neat.

Wilson: two of the most successful Web services, Skype and MySpace, were sold before we could really see if they could monetize what they’d done. They could have been beacons for us.

Wyman: MSFT is soon going to launch with RSS/browser extensions/etc., and innovation in aggregation space will come to screeching halt.

Wilson: Apple has set price at $1.99/show, and that destroys innovation in online video.

Crowley: dodgeball is part of something much bigger than we thought it would be.

Wilson : so many of the interesting projects in the last few years were side projects.

Greenstein: ’scratching your own itch’—solving a problem that you have.

Wilson: I like ‘myware’ (spying on yourself) and Last.fm

Schachter: web-based multiplayer games. My Citi bank account is more interactive than most things online. Flickr was a game company before they built Flickr.

Wyman: everyone is talking about ’services’ not ’sites’. The language has changed. Logic instead of data. A lot of web 2.0 stuff is not financially transactional.

Greenstein: structured blogging. Rather than force people to put data in structured places (e.g., ebay), they should use blogs and structure the data.
Wyman: ‘Structured blogging’ or ’structured publishing’ is an activity.
Microformats is one set/style of encoding the data. It’s a style that relies on XHTML extensions/class names. XML is another method.

What’s the value to the using/consuming population?

Schachter: but how do you get people to do this?

Wilson: As a content creator, I’m never going to be very structured in how I create content—it’s too much work. Let the users create the structure.

Wyman: we deliberately have built no applications to ‘read’ structured data, because we want to prove that people will structured blog purely because it makes sense. Ex: Incredibooks.com . It’s a group of homeschooled kids (8-14) who write book reviews for their age bracket. The structure remains in the post. In a market of components, value flows to the platform provider.

Larry Aronson: I have multiple identities with multiple credit cards, using different services.

Schachter: Tagging is about recall

Wyman: 1st person tagging (technorati) is more vulnerable to tagspam than 3rd person tagging (delicious)

Schachter: Delicious has a lot of behavioral data , because it’s not distributed, so he can control for spammers.

Crowley: Each Dodgeball profile is tied to a real cell number. You can only spam your own social network.

Wyman: we used to have something known as ‘crimes against the network’. that concept is dead.

Schachter: email used to be a reliable system, but now it’s somewhat broken.

Wilson: innovation comes from when there’s no obvious thing to do. Innovation is inversely correlated with periods of hype/excess capital……. The Web 2.0 term was invented with a reasonable amount of thoughtfulness.

Crowley: web 2.0 is all the stuff that we did before we got laid off.

Wyman: web 2.0 is a lot of marketing hype that makes it hard to see there’s really innovative stuff happening.

A couple of months ago, I helped kick off Noah Kagan’s Carnival of Marketing. Well it seems to be really taking off — he’s got hosts lined up through April!

But the submissions are a bit slow in coming — I had six this week, with seven slots for stories. No problem - I took the liberty of picking one of my own (sort of) - but folks need to send the submissions in. Great opportunity to market your expertise about marketing!

So here are this week’s words of wisdom on marketing from the blogosphere:

• Jack Yoest tells the fascinating story of The Million Dollar Home Page, Alex Tew’s experiment in micro-advertising.
• John Jantsch explains about pay per call advertising, a new advertising model similar to pay per click online in which you only pay when the ad generates a phone call. This is cool for local businesses - I didn’t even know this existed.
• Pam Stewart offers an inspirational post about shifting from the impersonal idea of “target markets” to being on a quest to find “your people”. Thought-provoking.
• David Daniels says that the emerging services sector represents a growing market opportunity in China. This means an increased growth in small and medium businesses and a particular opportunity for B2B companies marketing to them.
• Denise O’Berry explains how to read your website stats for marketing clues. As she says, “They’re the equivalent to asking someone who just arrived at (or called) your business for the first time — ‘How did you hear about us?’”
• Filling in the open slot with a bit of SSP, I was recently interviewed by John Jantsch about virtual handshakes and social software for his new podcast. It’s over 23 minutes - pretty meaty and a good overview of our book. I swear I don’t have a lisp, though - it’s just an unfortunate side-effect of the digital recording.
• And my pick of the week, Jim Logan explains how to use your weaknesses to sell more. This is my absolute favorite kind of blog post — very concise and immediately actionable. Great job, Jim!

“Digital Slob” Curt Brandao says that MySpace may be the biggest threat to North Korea. It’s a pretty funny piece about his “interview” with Kim Jung Il (who supposedly has a profile on MySpace), conducted “the style of shallow ’surveys’ that litter the Myspace landscape”, e.g.:

Question: If you could be any kind of tree, what kind of tree would you be?

Answer: The kind of tree that can crush the United States.

Funny stuff. But what really caught my attention in the excerpt of this story in my daily Google Alerts was Brandao’s description of MySpace:

Myspace is the Studio 54 of online social networking, minus the doorman who kept the ugly people out.

Back in October, I blogged my contribution to Oxford & York’s New Media & Entertainment Summit. Christopher Clark just sent me the official executive summary of the program. If you’re interested in the impact of blogging on the media industry, and vice-versa, this is well worth reading.

Executive Summary here.

Here are the panels that are summarized:

Evolving Revenue Models in Media and Entertainment
John Nendick, Ernst & Young LLP
Chris Ahearn, Reuters Media
Robin Johnson, The Financial Times
Thomas V. Ryan, EMI Music, North America
Thomas Gewecke, Sony BMG Music Entertainment

Technology and Social Change
Anthony Hopwood, Saïd Business School, Oxford University
Sandy Pentland, MIT, The Media Laboratory
Howard Bass, Ernst & Young LLP

New Media Meets Old Media
Josh Manchester, AdventuresOfChester.com
Jay Rosen, PressThink
Evan Williams, Odeo
Roger L. Simon, Pajamas Media
Jeremy D. Zawodny, Yahoo! Inc.

The Big 3: Media Piracy, Fraud, and Music Licensing
Bob Kohn, RoyaltyShare
David Teten, Nitron Advisors

Instinct and Promoting Entrepreneurship!
J.P. Donlon, Directorship
Thomas L. Harrison, Diversified Agency Services
Paul Maidment, Forbes.com

Everybody loves a secret, right? This has to be one of the most brilliant word-of-mouth campaigns I’ve ever seen. I’m not even going to tell you any more about it… go check out the secret for yourself and see if you’re not totally captivated.

One observation… whoever put this marketing campaign together really knows how to drive word-of-mouth on the Internet. Notice the links at the bottom of the movie pages to:
- Furl it
- Blogmark it
- Email it
- del.icio.us it
- Link to us
- Save it (in your browser bookmarks)
- Recommend it
- Sign up for their newsletter

They also have a podcast, a blog and a downloadable slideshow for those with slow connections. They’ve even posted to Flickr.

Masterfully done. If any of my readers know the folks at Prime Time Productions, let me know — I’d love to talk to them about this marketing campaign.

via Stephanie West Allen via New Thought Marketing Yahoo Group

First of all, what’s a “blooker”? A blooker is a blogger that has turned their blog into a book (a “blook”), e.g., Naked Conversations Blog => Naked Conversations, the book.

The Lulu Blooker Prize is offering a $1,000 prize in each of three categories (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Comic-blooks (i.e. based on a web-comic)), with an additional $1,000 to the overall winner. The judges are Cory Doctorow, Paul Jones.

Lulu, the sponsor of the contest, is a web-based self-publishing service with no setup fees and no minimum order — just the thing for your first blook. Lulu’s pricing is very competitive, too — about 1/3 less (for B&W perfect bound) than CafePress, their main competitor.

I’ll be hosting next week’s Carnival of Marketing here at The Virtual Handshake Blog next week. If you write about marketing, send me a link to your best post within the last week or two (or write one this week) by Sunday, January 22.

Remember, Carnival of Marketing only showcases the seven best submitted posts (as judged by the host), so bring your “A” game. No old posts, no regurgitating other people’s stuff, no thinly-veiled self-promotion, etc.

You can e-mail me at scott at thevirtualhandshake dot com or use this handy-dandy contact form to send me a link to your best post for consideration. You might also want to check out previous Carnivals of Marketing and the submission guidelines before submitting.

I think that one of the most obvious applications of the wiki model is in the legal space, and no surprise, it’s been launched: wiki-law.org . I think that this site has the potential to significantly change the practice of law.
My motivation and likelihood to contribute to this site is far higher than it is to contribute to Wikipedia. Like many businesspeople, I already have a library of template contracts; why not share them? (And I’m not even a lawyer.)

I held an email interview with Pangea3’s Vice President of Litigation & Research, Dan Savitt, about the site. (Dan is a recovering litigator.)

Teten: What other online legal resources do you consider comparable or competitors to wiki-law.org?

Savitt: FindLaw is a common and widely used resource for a broad array of areas. But it isn’t always well-maintained, with broken links and such and it isn’t always intuitively organized.

My favorite free legal service, albeit not entirely open source, is the Legal Information Institute’s site (run by Cornell Law School). I know that LII is developing an open source legal encyclopedia but is extending invitations to only its members. Law.com is a good resource for legal news.

Teten: When A hires B to do legal work for him, who owns the text of the resulting contract? Does A have unlimited rights to post that text on a wiki, share it with friends, etc.?

Savitt: I’m not sure but the terms of the engagement would likely govern, with the default being that the client has unlimited rights to do what he wishes with the work so long as the attorney did not reserve rights in it. Generally speaking, the attorney would not retain any property rights in the legal content of the document– because the law isn’t copyrightable — although the attorney could retain a property interest in the format of the contract if the form is unique and the attorney takes steps to protect his interest by imprinting the form with a copyright notice and a reservation of rights.

For example, Blumberg is the dominant publisher of legal forms. Its forms are copyrighted. And Blumberg has 10 different forms of subpoenas for 10 different situations. Now, Blumberg cannot copyright subpoenas in general. Anyone can produce one, and Blumberg has no right to claim that it has a property right in all subpoenas because it contains the same language as its subpoenas. But it can have a copyright in the look of its subpoenas because it originated the look of its subpoena and the look was unique and not already in the public domain.

Another example is the cases that you pull down from Westlaw or Lexis. You will note that those cases have copyrights too — but the copyrights are limited to the headnotes and Westlaw’s or Lexis’s added content, like page cites or other editorial additions.

Then there is the issue of intent/fair use, etc. If you go onto thesmokinggun.com or findlaw, you will find many examples of copyrighted materials, contracts, subpoenas, etc. But these sites aren’t violating copyrights, because the documents were introduced into the public domain; the senders had no expectation that the documents would be kept private; the documents are not unique or may not have copyrightable materials; and the posting party put the docs online for newsworthy purposes/ for the public benefit.

But as the Supreme Court’s decision in MGM v. Grokster last summer emphasized, a poster may be held liable for copyright infringement if it posts copyrighted material on-line with the intent to encourage users to infringe the copyrights even if the main thrust of the site is for lawful purposes. "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."

So if you are served with a subpoena on a Blumberg form, and you then post that form on-line with intent that people should use/copy the form for their own subpoenas (or otherwise know that people will use it for infringing purposes), then the poster may be liable for copyright infringement even if there is a substantial non-infringing use of the product/website.

Teten: In many cases, there is no formal term of engagement between a client and counsel. Client just says, please help me analyze/draft X, and the counsel does that. If there’s no formal documentation of ownership between the two parties, what should we assume are the ownership rights in a given contract?

Savitt: First off, New York — where I’m admitted — requires attorneys to enter into a formal written engagement agreements with their clients before beginning any legal work, so your question deals with a situation that isn’t or at least shouldn’t occur as often as you suggest. It’s just good practice, moreover, for an attorney to have an agreement in place that clearly defines the terms of the engagement, including who owns the resulting product.

Nevertheless, if, as you suggest, there is no agreement or the engagement letter is silent on who owns the resulting work product then, as I mentioned before, I would guess that once the attorney delivered the product to the client, the client then has full ownership rights in the product — be it a contract, complaint, letter or memo — and can do whatever he pleased with it so long as his use is lawful. There are at least a couple of caveats: such as, (i) the creation and delivery of a legal document by an attorney generally does not destroy any pre-existing third party property rights that are incorporated in the delivered product (like my Blumberg example) and (ii) that hypothetically the governing State’s law could suggest otherwise. That being said, I’ve never heard of a case where an attorney demanded that a client return all copies of a contract or memo he drafted because the client’s use purported violated a common law property rights. (The issue of a retaining lien is different and goes simply to enforcing the bargain between the attorney and client.)

Teten: Assuming wiki-law is successful, which is a reasonable assumption given the astonishing popularity of wikipedia.com, how will it impact the legal profession? In particular, how will it impact the "bread-and-butter" legal work that makes up a high percentage of the typical law firm’s revenues?

Savitt: I don’t see very much of a financial impact. If anything, it will detract business from other form providers. That’s because the beauty of law is that it is broad enough to cover new situations, and new situations rise up every new day. What is good for A yesterday may not be what B needs tomorrow, even though B believes that his situation is no different than A’s. How do you ultimately know that A’s form is good? It gets tested; modified and improved; and tailored. Ultimately, forms are only as good as the persons who use them.

Teten: Which is exactly the point of the wiki!

Savitt: True, but there is more to the law than cases, statutes and contracts. In the end, those are only tools. How to use those tools effectively to carry out your legal and business concerns? Well that’s the rub. And it’s awfully close to falling under the scope of practice of law statutes, which are typically so broad that they can capture whatever conduct the state regulators want them to.

Just ask the folks at We the People and look at wiki-law.org’s own disclaimers. We the People is one of several businesses that specializes in selling self-help legal “document preparation” service to non-lawyers using paraprofessionals. (I remember seeing in a couple of unauthorized practice of law regulatory actions that they have offered reference attorneys, who offer suggestions but do not create an attorney-client relationship with the consumers — to their customers as well.) Their target audience is small businesses and consumers who can’t afford to or don’t want to pay an attorney for what they perceive as relatively simple legal tasks.

In essence, the site says use this great resource – but caveat emptor and don’t blame me if the information is wrong. Ultimately, the reader has to decide for himself if he can rely on the information he finds on wiki-law.org. Is it is dependable? Is it complete? Is it up to date? How is someone supposed to know the answer except through professional expertise, intuition or blind faith? Lawyers know that the law doesn’t always work intuitively. I’m not suggesting that only lawyers can make that determination but odds are they will, as a group, be much better prepared than non-lawyers. Wiki-law could be very useful in educating non-lawyers about the law, but it cannot teach the ability to think critically about an issue that is beaten into every attorney beginning with his first year in law school.

Where I do see a tremendous opportunity is for attorneys to take advantage of the resource. I know that there are already dozens of web-based communities where practitioners of similar ilk compare notes and exchange ideas. In other words, the value I see in the site is as a legal resource, whose value will rise or fall depending on the reliability of the contributors, their content, and the strength of the site’s editorial guidelines. It may even work itself into legal opinions once it gains acceptance. I could see wiki-law as the ultimate living legal constitution that aggregates legal discussion, commentary and knowledge. The possibilities are really interesting. But all it takes is one wrong answer and the resource’s credibility could be mortally wounded – causing attorneys and their clients to stay away. Ultimately, the key will be in the content providers and their editorial good senses.

Dan continued….
Interestingly, our interview highlights one of my concerns about of wiki-law in that my answers reflect only my elementary largely uneducated understanding of copyright law as clouded by my experience and understanding of property law in general – “Savitt on Copyright”, if you will. But I am not an expert on copyright law and I haven’t reviewed any of the caselaw and secondary sources that are required to give a proper understanding of some of the issues (despite that I included a quote from a recent Supreme Court opinion that I happen to have on my laptop last night.) In other words, I learned long ago as a junior associate that you wouldn’t want to buy this version of Savitt on Copyright. So, I just want to clarify that that my response is more speculation than legal knowledge

That being said, I am sure that lawyers logging into wiki-law could annotate and properly give my responses the critical eye it needs and provide a more thorough response. But that leads to the issue of specific legal advice and independently rendering it to the public (something which we can’t do here at Pangea3). Would the site allow people to pose legal questions and then have anyone — lawyers or laymen — to offer advice tailored to those suggestions?

Teten: I don’t think that’s their current model, but that’s a logical service to offer. Ingenio.com and similar sites already offer this sort of access.

Savitt: The State Bar regulators wouldn’t be too happy about that and might see wiki-law or its users as aiding and abetting the unauthorized practice of law, which regulators consider just as bad as engaging in the activity itself.

And then there is the issue of liability for a wrong answer — could the responder/poster be held liable for malpractice or under an unauthorized practice of law? Why not? A court could find that the disclaimer was boilerplate and not want to enforce it. Then again, the (stated) purpose of unauthorized practice of law statutes/prohibitions is consumer protection — and not job protection. Regulators who see it as their duty to protect the public from charlatans posing as legal experts may ultimately see that the public would be adequately protected. 30 years ago, paralegals in a law office were a rarity, and now they are an integral part of any decent sized functioning law office taking on tasks that don’t require the lawyer’s full legal acumen. 15 years ago, contract attorneys doing document reviews were a rarity.

But now even the bankruptcy courts, with their strict fee sharing prohibitions, recognize that they are also an integral part of controlling costs in any decent sized litigation. And in the past few years, the ABA has promulgated amendments to its Model Rules to provide safe harbors for working with foreign attorneys and those amendments have been adopted in one form or the other by many States.

One additional thought, as legal costs have skyrocketed, and there seems to be no corresponding increase in the caliber of legal services to match the increases, the public, both businesses and consumers, are looking for more value: consistent high-quality service, reasonable price, and efficiency from their legal service providers. And they are expanding their sources for that value, which in part is driving Pangea3’s business (although we don’t independently provide legal services to the public): litigation consultants, legal technology providers, paraprofessional legal document preparation service providers and other alternative legal service providers. Wiki-law may fit in there but if and when wiki-law turns from a resource into a provider, well, then my paternal unauthorized practice of law concerns get tripped again.

In the end, intriguing legal issues. I’m having flashbacks to the bar exam as I type this.

Regardless, the site — like Pangea3 — is a natural progression in how law continues to advance and adapt to the world around it, albeit kicking and screaming.

Thanks for the dialogue.

Teten: Thank you! The legal industry has traditionally been marked (or marred) by a notable resistance to take full advantage of technology. I look forward to wiki-law, Pangea3, and other attacks on the traditional model upending the traditional apple cart.

Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing has talked to dozens of top bloggers about the changes and trends they’d like to see in the blogosphere and compiled them all in Bloggers Wish List for 2006. I contributed my thoughts:

I’d like to see more of less. What do I mean? I’d like to see blog carnivals with the seven best posts rather than all 50 that were submitted. I want better tools for subscribing just to the information I want. I want to see people acting more as filters than as aggregators. I think posting every passing thought is passe, at least for business blogs - I’d like to see people stay more focused.

Many others echoed similar sentiments, as well as some other things I agreed with, even if I hadn’t thought of them. Here are some of my other favorites:

Dana VanDen Heuvel
-I’d like to see more people move beyond ‘blogging’ and reach deeper to the ‘metaphors’ that blogging represents like customer-to-corporation (read: people-to-people) connection and the role blogging plays in the participant economy.
- Let’s see more bloggers realize that they are part of changing the world as we know it, even if only in some small way in a little corner of the world. Online conversation is a beautiful thing.
…
I’d like to see less uncivil blogging. People starting blogs just to trash companies or trash other people. If you can’t say something to someone’s face, you shouldn’t see it on a blog.

Bill Flitter
Marketers need to consider blogging seriously, if not by creating a blog for their brand at the very least participate in a constructive manner with the community they serve. This could simply be just commenting on blogs that mention their brand. Let your customers no you are listening. It makes for a happier community.

Nancy White
“more chocolate, less baloney”

Dave Dolak
I’d like to see more focus .. blogs that stick with a theme rather than just random comments and a lot of disconnected nonsense. (I so agree, Dave!)

Nicole Simon
We should be challenging. Expect more from the people around you, including your readers. How else are we suppose to learn and evolve if everything stays mediocre and just for the mainstream taste?
…
I want less people who do not understand why connecting to the internet is not an addiction but a new form of social interaction. I am tired of seeing those pity looks because they think, they do have a “real life” when all they do is watching television all night or going out in bars having meaningless conversations with people they already know.

I love lists like this. Why? Sure, the comments themselves are thought-provoking, but more importantly, it’s a quick way to learn about new people who are like-minded, or who have really smart things to say and say them well. I’ve added several new blogs to my blog reader as a result of this.

It’s like “speed networking for bloggers”.

The extremely active mylinkedinpowerforum has evolved into an online network platform for LinkedIn users, since LinkedIn deliberately does not provide that functionality. Konstantin Guericke posted on that list “three common misconceptions about LinkedIn”. My notes are below.

1) LinkedIn is primarily for people who like to network online.

We wouldn’t have started to LinkedIn to provide yet another online networking community. There are plenty of Yahoo groups or sites like Ecademy, Ryze and OpenBC that serve the purpose. We purposefully designed LinkedIn to attract an audience far broader: those who have no interest in online networking. We estimate that this group is 20 times larger than the group that likes to network online. We cater to people who believe that relationships matter in business and who feel existing tools are not providing them with sufficient help to effectively manage and leverage their existing network of former co-workers, business partners and clients. More and more people join LinkedIn to be found. The typical LinkedIn user is fairly close to the typical business person. They are quite busy with their work and quite conservative. They may not accept the first invitation they get to LinkedIn. They may not send out any invitations for six months. But if they receive an interesting opportunity, they will respond. We would not have much of a business if our Pro account holders, who pay $200 per month, would only have access to people who like online networking. For example, if they are a recruiter, if the person has the right kind of background, they will contact them-no matter how few connections they have. And our data shows quite clearly that users with one or two connections are quite responsive. And, it makes sense: if you get an good opportunity, you act-especially if it comes to you via an introduction.

Teten: Konstantin is defining online networking as specifically using sites like OpenBC, Ecademy, Ryze, and so on. We think of online networks much more broadly. 84 percent of American Internet users have used the Internet to contact or get information from a group–more than have used the Internet to read news, search for health information, or to buy something. Of course, most of them are not heavy users. But virtually every business user of the Internet is using the Internet to increase sales, recruit people, or in other ways leverage whom they know. 10% of all Internet searches are for proper names. Your Internet presence and your online network have a very clear impact on your business success—whether or not you are consciously managing it.

I’d suggest the real distinction Konstantin is making is between people who proactively seek to meet lots of people, and people who do not. Most businesspeople fit in the latter category. I think that LinkedIn is striking a reasonable balance between the conflicting demands of these multiple categories of users.

2) LinkedIn doesn’t like people who like to network online.

Absolutely not. In fact, we have been working on addressing the needs of this segment as we think there is some revenue potential. And in the next three releases, we will be adding lots of features for networkers, job seekers and service providers. Some will only be accessible to Personal Plus account holders, but most will be available to free Personal account holders as well. What we will not tolerate, however, is that a very small group of uses (about 0.01% of our user base) ignores the user agreement they accepted when joining LinkedIn and who are causing existing LinkedIn users to close their accounts, to lose faith in the referral system and to turn non-users off to LinkedIn. So we look very carefully to make sure the incentives are correct, so that we maximize the value of LinkedIn to most LinkedIn users. Since we estimate that about 5% of our users like to network online, at most 1 in 500 people in this group fall into this category of user. 499 out of 500 networkers are behaving very responsibly on LinkedIn, and I applaud them for not trying to cheat their way to get an unfair share of attention, but who focus on doing the right thing, so that their actions make them stand out.

3) Inviting someone to connect is the proper way to strike up a conversation with someone you’d like to meet

Teten: I really hate when people do this.

We provide four different contact mechanisms to get in touch with someone in your network who you don’t know. They are in order of use: introductions, InMail, OpenLink messages and group introductions. Except for InMail, they are all free to the sender, and InMail is never required to reach someone within your network. It is against the user agreement to invite people who don’t know you. We made this a rule since we learned from the failures of other communities, where easy contact drove out precisely the people most everyone wanted to reach and where un-brokered contact turned off the broad set of business users from ever joining.

Teten: I’d add to this list that many online communities also suffer from inappropriate content, for lack of moderation, and that can destroy their value. E.g, flame wars.

This is why include “report user to LinkedIn for possible violation of the user agreement’ as one of the four options to responding to an invitation. Once a pattern of complaints emerges, we follow up with the users. One thing we have learned is that people who invited more than 3,000 people (especially those inviting existing members of LinkedIn) are more often than not generate a significant level of complaints, so it made sense to limit invitations to that number. This is a limit that 99.99% of LinkedIn users are unlikely to ever to reach, but we hope that knowing such a limit exist will make people be more selective in who they invite. However, not everyone who has sent 3,000 invitations draws significant complaints, so that’s why it’s a flexible limit and users hitting the limit can request a review to get their limit increased.

- Konstantin Guericke
- VP Marketing and Co-Founder, LinkedIn
- Professional Profile