Following are my notes on the BRITE Workshop on Online Communities, at Columbia Business School
Community as Part of Your Site Offering: Strategy from 50,000 Feet and Tactics from the Trenches
Sylvia Marino, Executive Director, Community Operations, Edmunds.com
3 person staff running this. I”m the Executive Director of Community Operations. I have my own P&L. [...]

E-Commerce Times reports that:
In response to advertising industry concerns over security, MySpace.com has removed 200,000 “objectionable” profiles from its social network. The site erased profiles containing risque or hate speech content.
I”m quoted in the article, and I won”t repeat it all here, but let me expand on it…
This action by MySpace is a reaction to [...]

As usual, Dave Pollard posts a well-thought-out, thorough piece on “Social Networking Tools & Knowledge Management: What You Can Do Now“. This was presented at the KMWorld and Intranets 2005 Conference. It includes an overview what was wrong with the traditional siloed social network model (Friendster, etc.), and what you can do [...]

In this blog, we typically write about the practical use of social software. This month, I”d like to step back and look at the broader cultural implications of social software. Also, the points below are a draft of the speech I”ll be delivering Friday at the Virtual Handshake conference. (We hope to see [...]

Earlier this week Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion detailed some of his best RSS tips and tricks in a post entitled Ten RSS Hacks. Steve’s post shows that RSS offers much more than simply streamlined reading of blogs and breaking news stories.
Although Steve took some of the better tips, I’ll share three of my own

Track [...]

After my post about how to get paid to blog, even without your own blog, I started thinking about other companies that are paying people to use social software, and I realized that there are actually quite a few now that will pay you to:
- provide contact information
- refer people for jobs
- refer business deals
- [...]

Blogs and wikis are two specific types of content management systems (CMS). While these two buzz words share many commonalities, there are also a number of very important distinctions between the two. I”ve created a visual to quickly summarize some of the differences.

I encourage you to compare the MSNBC blogs to Wikipedia to [...]

I recently wrote about how the online conversation is real. The basics of that post is that blogging fosters interaction. No surprise, to be a successful blogger, reading, writing, and responding to others within the larger community is an absolute must.
There are a growing number of ways that users can keep track of [...]

Historically, the content and design of a website have been inseparable. In more technical terms, that means that the data (”content”) and the presentation (”design”) elements have typically been mixed together in one document, that document usually being a web page (such as “index.html” or “about.html”). In order to create and format the content of [...]

For a great overview of why I”m so excited about social software, a.ka. social machines, see Wade Roush’’s article, Social Machines from the MIT Technology Review. The conversation is continued at continuousblog.net.
As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We”ve used them all [...]