Gapingvoid’s take on online social networks and business boils down to:
You can’t blame the tools – they’re here, they work.
Niches rules (and they make money)
Nobody cares what the MBA’s think
You need a great product
Integrity matters
Love works.
This is just a quick mention of this story (also here) . Jimmy Wales tells us he plans to use www.openserving.com to offer us all free hosting plus 100% of all advert revenue from the stuff we write, as long as we keep a link to his company Wikia. He plans to host all sorts of open source software (including wordpress which creates this blog) and allow us all to create multiple author blogs with voting and feedback buttons etc etc.
How will he make his money – it looks like it should come from advertising on wikia.
This is an enormous opportunity to draw many more people into using the social web, and for non-profits to not only see their web cost tumble, but start earning money from the things they and their supporters are saying. It is also likely to become the focus of a huge amount of (mainly open source ?) creative effort to make the different websites work well and look fab.
Still don’t understand it properly though.
jimmy wales wikia wordpress drupal wiki
David Wilcox has just put up a post which helps think about the relationship between formal and informal structures – whether in non-profit or profit organisations.
He cites a thought which popped into the head of Lloyd Davis at It’s Social Stupid. It occurs to Lloyd that creativity most often happens in the ‘shadows’ – the informal links into and out of formal organisations – rather than within the naturally constraining structures which were designed to get things done.
I think we all spend some considerable time in the shadows. You know: Read more
I was reading parts of the draft of Charles Leadbeater’s new book We-Think. (well worth a good mooch – and you can comment before he publishes.) He’s grappling with a leadership dilemma part of which can be summed up as: if organisations and professionalism are so precious to us, why are modest online structures able to accomplish so much with networked volunteers?. Read more