Mitch Arnowitz

May 15, 2008

threadless

Make no mistake about what this co does (besides tees)

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February 26, 2008

The Social Times: What's the Future of D.C. Technology?

As reprinted from AdMarketing list

Nick ONeill runs The Social Times blog. If you're RSS feed isn't picking this blog up, it should! He also runs the allfacebook blog- the unofficial facebook blog

Nick had an interesting post this morning:

What's the Future of D.C. Technology?

Nick's overall tone is positive and says that WDC is well on the way but... that the tech community is still missing a few things. Included: positive press, funding, a culture of risk.

So, what do you think? Nick's comments about The Washington Post are pretty pointed. Do they have it all wrong? Can anyone point to recent positive press about our community? His comments about a culture of risk are interesting. Since Netpreneur days, I see many of you on the street that have fallen into safer yobs in and outside the Gvpt arena. Not that that's a bad thing ... But what do YOU think? Are we not risk takers back east?

At the sake of throwing kerosene on this fire, I'll ask our old friend Shannon Henry to comment if appropriate. Shannon's been gone from the area for awhile but I know many AdMarketers recall Shannon's stint with WaPo + TechCapital. Heck, she probably even wrote about many of your companies!

Continue reading "The Social Times: What's the Future of D.C. Technology?" »

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March 08, 2007

Messege boards: some things never change

I recently saw this note from Yahoo! News. Long before Web 2.0 was a term, people were grappling with the issue of unmoderated discussions. Unfiltered discussions allow for grand standing and flame wars. It can also be difficult to determine metrics for theses conversations. An active thread or even the number of comments can be misleading when trying to gage interaction. Sometimes, we use the number of posters or people participating in a conversation but that can also be misleading.

The upside to all of this activity and interaction is, of course, that people are involved and helping to create the content.

To Yahoo! News readers:

Yahoo! News is working on new ways for readers to comment on the news and participate in a discussion around it. While we work on our new community features, the message boards that were linked from individual news articles have been taken offline.

As they were set up, the Yahoo! News message boards allowed a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion. In addition, related discussions from similar news articles were not easily linked.

Over the next few months, we plan to offer new discussion forums based on topics in the news and incorporating the latest features to foster a better discussion for all of our readers.

Neil Budde
General Manager
Yahoo! News

Continue reading "Messege boards: some things never change" »

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October 19, 2006

It's Still the Wild, Wild West

Business Week carried a short read on companies that use online community building for focus groups and to develop products. Not a new topic by any stretch but still good to read this in the mainstream media.

What's interesting here are the comments. Just look at the first one below. I guess the rules of engagement are still being written...

Nickname: John Mack
Review: Some of the comments made to the community on this web site obviously come from moderators paid directly or indirectly by Glaxo. They make claims regarding the drug's effectiveness that are clearly not supported by any facts, claims that would be illegal for Glaxo to make directly.
Date reviewed: Oct 15, 2006 8:43 PM

Continue reading "It's Still the Wild, Wild West" »

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November 07, 2005

The (continuing) power of online comunities

I've recently had the need to seek advice from a couple of the more popular online communities. I dropped by the QuickBooks community to ask a question about using QuickBooks template features. A forum moderator stepped up and saved the time and dime of calling tech support.

I then hopped over to Craigs List to find out if anyone knew where we could plan a Birthday Party at a local movie theatre.

Key was response time in both instances. The info delivered was right on-target and the people were friendly. Both exchanges worked without a hitch- if I can only remember passwords now! No Spam either!

These exchanges both left a smile on my face and took me back to earlier days of online communities. For the first time, I also thought about upgrading Quicken!

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August 24, 2005

The Well is for sale

webcommunities reports that:

The Well, an online community founded in 1985, is to be sold by it's current owner Salon.com. Salon bought the community in 1999 for US $5 million.  Since then, it's always managed to turn a profit but memberships (costing $120 to $150 per year) have declined from 6000 to 4000 between 1999 and
today.

Salon expects to achieve a sale price of around $500,000 - about the equivalent of one year's subscription fees. That's probably a bargain if the members themselves buy the community... 

More.

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May 04, 2005

BackFence's Blog-Like Local Strategy

Updates: 'citizen journalism' websites Backfence went live.  The  'build  your own ad app. is  interesting. It'll be great to see the traffic come and then how 'they' aggregate the information.
-------------------

March 1, 2005: More on Backfence, Northern Virginia's start-up community website (cyberjournalist.net):
BackFence's Blog-Like Local Strategy

Rather than relying on technology and massive infrastructure, they’re going to take a “bottom up” approach and let local “influencers” (and others) in the local communities (not major metro areas) generate content.

The comment to this post is interesting:

I will open a bottle of Pinot over this one.  To an online marketplace like ours that connects local repair shops and vehicle owners, this is the kind of model that keeps me up at night (drinking wine).  I hope they stay on the east coast for a while.

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March 08, 2005

What is community?

What is community?

commoncraft points to an interesting conversation on Corante's group blog, BrandShift. The intro post by Jennifer Rice is good, the comments are great.

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February 23, 2005

An Introduction to Activism on the Internet

John Emerson has written An Introduction to Activism on the Internet . Included are easy to read chapters that make it easy to point and click to resources.

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February 21, 2005

Wikimedia Foundation Needs Your Help

Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. And we need your help. (as seen on Portals and KM)

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a non-profit organization with the goal of providing free knowledge to every person in the world. Meeting this goal through the maintenance, development and distribution of free content, Wikimedia relies on public donations to run its wiki-based projects.

Wikimedia provides computing and network resources to create and distribute many reference works including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, and the Wikimedia Commons. The content of these projects is provided to the public free of charge.

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January 14, 2005

Online Communities: Fusions of Silicon and Flesh

  This piece comes from Ohmynews:

Online Communities: Fusions of Silicon and Flesh

Starting from the U.S. Defense Department's ARPANET information network, the Internet is entering its 35th year. The Internet only began to have an influence on the general population, however, after the graphic-based web browser "Netscape" appeared in 1995, meaning this year would represent the 10th year of the popularization of the medium. How has the Internet changed the world over the last 10 years?

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January 09, 2005

Two's company, three's a `community'

Passed along by webcommunities:

MercuryNews.com | 01/09/2005 | Two's company, three's a `community'

Although ``community'' has been a hackneyed term for decades -- terms such as the ``black community,'' the ``gay community,'' the ``international disaster-relief community'' and the ``investor community'' have long been over-applied to diverse and often fractured realms -- the Internet has provided a spaceless ``place'' for communities to convene. Indeed, there you will find not only the ferret lover community but also the ``Zitlover'' community. (Don't believe? Google.)

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December 31, 2004

Hallmark Cards, Research and Online Communities

Common Craft & Lee LeFever point to a MarketingSherpa article on Hallmark Cards Idea Exchange.

I was originally pointed to Common Craft by Jim Cachel after his company, Forum One, concluded one of it's annual Online Community Summits and... I've been a reader ever since. Lee offers all kinds of value, helped me to understand RSS feeds and hey, even blogs about getting married.

Hearing about Hallmark communities took me back to an older AdMarketing conversation on How Marketers Use Interactive Tools. Many well known community builders participated in this conversation. The conversation actually kicks off here and many of the lessons learned are still relevant.

For this discussion, we engaged Communispace founder Diane Hessan.  Communispace builds online communities for businesses and worked on the Idea Exchange initiative. More on Communispace's work with Hallmark: Case Study: Hallmark.

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July 04, 2004

A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

"This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it. "

What caught my eye was the exposure given to Doug Engelbart, creater of the mouse and many other things. While at Netpreneur, we had the good fortune of bringing several Internet pioneers to Washington, DC. Among them was Mr. Engelbart. He is a remarkable man... This article also ties Engelbart into TrackBacks and Wikis.

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