BusinessWeek’s Rob Hof is reporting that Google is launching a new “app” tonight called Google Sites. As I write this, it is not yet live, however, according to Rob, it uses the “Jotspot” wiki platform Google acquired in late 2006. Previously, it has been reported that Google Sites will replace another Google App called Google Page Creator which is currently be used by a grand total of 23 people — all employees of Google. (But don’t quote me on that.)
There are already several great free, easy-to-use, wiki-apps available, but I still find that most people I know in the real world (i.e., people who don’t read this blog), have no idea what a “wiki” is beyond the website Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that uses a wiki platform and approaches. But thinking that all wikis are encyclopedias is a bit like thinking all books are encyclopedias.)
Maybe repositioning Jotspot as “Google Sites” will help people get over their aversion, fear or misunderstanding of what wikis can be.
I’ve been “hosting” the wiki SmallBusiness.com for almost two years and my appreciation of the read/write approach, the communities they foster and the versatility of the platform grows continuously.
About six months ago, I finally realized (in a duh moment) how much working on a wiki reminded me of using Hypercard, the Mac program from 1980s that was my first hands-on involvement with “hypermedia.” The little program — and it was little — used the metaphor of a stack of blank cards on which you could write anything and connect words (link) them to text on other cards: hypertext. It was a very simple concept to understand and, more importantly, the only programming necessary was the ability to type and link. I credit using it as a way to organize notes on my Mac with why I found it so easy to grasp immediately what the web was about.
It didn’t surprise me later when I ran across some interviews in which the creator of the wiki concept, Ward Cunningham, said he conceived of it first as a web equivalent of Hypercard.
It will be interesting to see if Google can help a more general audience grasp what they can do when they break away from thinking a wiki is “Wikipedia” and realize it’s just an endless stack of blank pages that you can use to organize a bake sale — or create your own company’s encyclopedia. Or anything in-between.
Later: Allen Stern (CenterNeworks) says he “hopes people never get caught up on lingo - as long as it does what they need it to, who cares what it’s called.” While I agree that it’s more important for people to use it than know what it’s called, I think a tech platform can go mainstream quicker if those who provide alternative services that do the same thing can at least all agree what to call the platform category. I can remember when companies were launching blogging platforms right- and left, but calling them things like “spaces” and “web journals.” We have a category name for e-mail. We have a category name for spread-sheets. (I could go on, but you get my drift.) Why shouldn’t the same be true for the category of wiki creation applications.
Thursday morning: Google luanched sites overnight with this explanatory video. Allen will be happy. The word “wiki” is never mentioned:
The white-coat gang at Hammock Labs are playing with Facebook pages. If you’re a Facebookian (Facebooker?) and care to play along, please “fan” Hammock or SmallBusiness.com (or both). As the lab rats have already discovered there’s no button that says, “fan,” here’s their first discovered recommendation: “Tell someone to add your page to their list of product and services — don’t tell them to “fan you.”
Also: I can assure you that no animals were harmed and no lead was used in the creation of the still rather wet-paint (and sparse) pages.
“The company that grew out of business.com — a search engine used by businesses to find products and services — is now on the auction block, and could fetch anywhere between $300 million and $400 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Closely held business.com is expected to attract a host of interest from the likes of media companies such as Dow Jones & Co. and New York Times Co., these people said. Requests for comment from Business.com and the New York Times were not returned yesterday evening. Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, declined to comment.
While the coverage today is focusing on the domain name and the search-engine, it should be noted the company recently launched a “user-generated-content” component of the site called “work.com” — a very wiki-like platform. I might add, work.com seems very influenced, to the point of flattery, by an approach and ethos of the first iteration of SmallBusiness.com — an iteration that was retired in 2002. (I’m in no way suggesting work.com is a knock-off, merely that it follows much of the same spirit and approach of the 2000-2002 version of SmallBusiness.com*.)
The “work.com” part of business.com is, to me at least, the most compelling aspect of the site. Almost everything else you can find on business.com is standard data licensed and aggregated from third-parties. And while the search functions are impressive and have been honed through years of work — while most people thought they were out of business — the site’s business model has appeared to depend greatly on a form of advertising arbitrage that buys traffic from other search engines and resells that traffic to advertisers — at a higher rate. (Note: I am not implying that “arbitrage” is in any way an inappropriate business model in this case. It can be in other cases, i.e., splogs that carry Google ads. However, in their case, Business.com is adding value to the search by narrowing its focus to business-related websites, resources and products. Also, if someone from Business.com wants to challenge my suggestion that advertising arbitrage is the key to a significant portion of their revenue, I will be glad to add that clarification to this post.)
[Update & Clarification: As the coverage of this news on the tech-blogosphere has been heavily dominated by the suggestion that what is in play here is a domain name for $300+ million, I feel more compelled to point out that, despite it's snarkiness, Nick Denton at least understands what the business value of the strategy the folks at business.com have followed. As I noted, the arbitrage business is scalable and profitable. The "user-generated-content" portion of the strategy -- work.com -- adds a component of "social" and "user-generated-content" to the site that is, no doubt, contributing greatly to the SEO, link-pulling mojo of the site. In other words, like it or not, there's a business at business.com -- not just a domain name. Also, Om Malik explains other assets that go far beyond the URL that Business.com represents, primarily the affiliate relationships, etc.]
My main point is this: It’s not a URL they are trying to sell for $300-$400 million. It’s technology, traffic and a proven and scalable business model that is currently generating (according to the report) $15 million in profit — and some traction in showing they have a model that will attract engaged “participants,” not just one-off “users” or “searchers.”
That said, I will note it’s an incredible brand/URL for the right purchaser — and I hope Jake and Sky receive a massive boat-load of cash for everything they’ve put into it.
*Background and disclosure: Hammock Publishing today owns SmallBusiness.com, so one might assume I’d like to perpetuate the myth that the news today is all about the value of a URL. (Granted, it has quite a bit of intrinsic value, as a Google search for the term “small business” will display.) From 2000-2002, SmallBusiness.com was owned by another venture that I and others invested in. That venture failed. Its failure was a classic, poster-child dot.com bust story. It sucked. It was, without a doubt, the worst experience of my professional — and in many ways, personal, life. After archiving the content of that earlier iteration of SmallBusiness.com for three years, I launched a wiki-platform small-business knowledge base on SmallBusiness.com last year. The site is an avocation, passion and laboratory at this time. But, hey, I’m an entrepreneur, so go figure. Another disclosure: I’m a long-time fan of Business.com founder Jake Winebaum, from his magazine entrepreneurship days and of Work.com and Business.com editor Daniel Kehrer, who I knew in his magazine-editing days and later. (More about the history of SmallBusiness.com here.)
Recently on this blog, I dipped my toe into a debate about the age of individuals who start and run businesses. My point then (and now) is that while intuitively convincing, the empirical evidence related to business creation and success suggests that numerous factors are important to the success of an enterprise and that if you focus too much on one factor (age), you’ll be lulled into crediting the wrong factors — and making connections that perhaps should not be made.
So it is no surprise I — at least on an intuitive level — agree with and endorse the arguments made in this NYTimes.com article that American education, societal, cultural and parenting factors may be playing a role in juicing up entrepreneurial urges among American young people.
However, lest we forget, the whole “idea” of America was created by individuals who were small merchants, farmers, artisans and others who were, what today we’d call, “self-employed.” I’m all for celebrating youthful entrepreneurship, but I merely want to remind people that the idea that opportunity is something provided by big institutions — and not created by individuals — is a notion that was popularized in the Industrial Age or that dates back to pre-colonial European institutions that placed power and opportunity into the hands of religious, feudal, or other forms of tribal entities.
There may be something about contemporary American society that is encouraging young people to get in touch with their inner-entrepreneur, however that “inner-entrepreneur” is part of a DNA that can be traced back three centuries.
Brittney Gilbert, one of the nation’s first staff bloggers hired by a traditional media company, has just posted a resignation message on Nashville is Talking, the “hyperlocal†blog and “aggregator†site she hosts for Nashville ABC affiliate, WKRN-TV. Brittney, who often found herself caught in the cross-fire of local Nashville blogger political exchanges, cited her “thin skin†as the reason for her resignation.
Quote:
“The internet is a mean place. I know, because I’ve contributed to the mean plenty. I think it’s even safe to say that some of the hatred displayed toward me was brought on by me. I readily admit to being snarky when I should have been thoughtful. I was dismissive and sarcastic, when I should have been more open-minded. But, posting all day, every day will do that to you. Blogging isn’t meant to be done that way, on the clock, 9-6. Feeling pressure to constantly update will make you do stupid, careless things, like link to a screed I find abhorrent without making it abundantly clear to anyone who passed by what I meant. It was a lazy post, and it’s my own fault that people misunderstood me. It’s because I’m burned out. It sounds lame, but blogging all day every day can wear you down pretty quick. Especially when you have thin skin, as I do. See, I thought it would get thicker. And, in a way, I guess it did some. But it seemed as though people just got more and more vicious.â€
Brittney’s departure from the station comes about a month after the departures of the station manager and news manager that oversaw the development of the station’s blogging strategy, although she does not mention their leaving having anything to do with her decision to resign.
Brittney, a long-time blogger, was recruited by the station about two years ago when consultant Terry Heaton and then-station manager Mike Sechrist developed a plan to reach out to the then nascient blogging community in Nashville. I’ve noted on this blog several times that WKRN (Mike, Terry, Brittney and others) did it right by respecting and embracing local bloggers in the only way that works: becoming a part of it, not with the cluelessness of a typical traditional media trying to impose pre-conceived notions on the rabble.
Brittney, after joining WKRN, toned down the language of her personal blogging, but was allowed by Sechrist and the station’s then-news director, Steve Sabato, to continue writing with bite, voice and attitude. She has aggressively linked to all areas of the Nashville blogosphere and, as a result, draws fire from all sides. And I mean fire. She lists some of the in-coming blasts she’s received in the past 24 hours in her post. It is this type of vitriol that has done her in, she says in her post.
Note: By mistake, I wrote-over this post and because of some user-error mistakes, I didn’t have a back-up of the post. However, I remembered that I feed the posts from this blog via RSS to my Facebook “notes page” and found it there. However, I think this is an earlier version of of the post, but I can’t recall what I had changed.
Yesterday, Dave Winer outlined some suggestions (hopes) for the next step in the evolution of the web, somewhat related to the long-envisioned “semantic web or Web 3.0” — and what Dave calls for discussion sake, Web 3.0. Building on the read-write-share, grassroots, “amateur,” nature of what has been lumped together and called Web 2.0, Dave “hopes” for a day when “professional media” fully embraces, “the new media, no longer see it as a threat to their continued employment. See amateur public writing, the former audience who is no longer silent, as sources who can get attention for their ideas without going through an intermediary.”
MediaPost.com today has an article about magazines launching topical wikis. Like the steady adoption of blogging by traditional media, this is another example of the blending of “corporate media” and “personal media” into something we’ll one day call, well, whatever it is we will call the web when we stop putting numbers on it.
Ironically, I do not recommend that marketers or magazine people read the MediaPost.com article. Indeed, I have long said that if you want to understand wikis, the last thing you should do is read about them. For example, I spend a big chunk of each week tending a large-scale wiki and I have absolutely no idea what the following sentence from the article means: “The social invitation to create knowledge offers a form of audience interaction that may even be more engaging than social networks, where people create profiles but don’t necessarily interact.”
I’ll be blogging a great deal more on this topic in coming months.
Disclosure: A wiki I host, SmallBusiness.com runs on a beta-version of Web 3.0. (Note for the non-geek: while I do host that wiki, the suggestion that Web 3.0 is a release version of software is a joke.)
Passing along something that hit my SmallBusiness.com radar this morning: Today, eBay is having a one-day only 20¢ listing promotion (typically, fees range from 20¢ to as high as $4.80). From time to time, eBay runs these special 20¢ listing days, but does not announce the promotion until immediately prior to the day. Spring cleaning, anyone?
How can I persuade my teachers to allow me to use Wikipedia as a legitimate research source? —Kaitlyn Grigsby, Medina, Ohio
Wales: I would agree with your teachers that that isn’t the right way to use Wikipedia. The site is a wonderful starting point for research. But it’s only a starting point because there’s always a chance that there’s something wrong, and you should check your sources if you are writing a paper.
Over the past week or so, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends has asked me lots of great questions about SmallBusiness.com. She has just posted the interview. If you are interested in the creation of a giant wiki-model community, you may find some helpful things there. Or, if you just want to know what the heck SmallBusiness.com is, it will be insightful. Thanks, Anita. And thanks to all others who will help me spread some SmallBusiness.com linkage, viralish love. (Yes, that was link-begging. While I’m at it, please register and fill out a User Profile. Here’s mine.)
I’ve posted a do-it-myself, how-to screencast on the SmallBusiness.com weblog called, “How to create a SmallBusiness.com account and User Profile.” I’ve got to work on my announcer voice and delivery. Fortunately, it’s only two minutes. What it lacks in production value, it made up in speed of production: about an hour.
We’ve added some features (I call them conversational features, but “social” works) to SmallBusiness.com, the wiki. The features are still a bit clunky as we’re working to keep it on the Mediawiki platform as much as possible. I blogged about what we’ve done on the SmallBusiness.com blog. We’re not “creating a social networking site” — it’s still a wiki. We’re merely adding “features” that highlight the contributors to the site. There are additional “conversational” features coming soon (and an RSS feed of every page — the code is there already — it’s just a little hidden and I’d like it to be more orange-button one-clickish). Check it out.
The SmallBusiness.com Weblog launches tomorrow*, but since this is about all of the announcing we’ll be doing (except adding a link to the front of SmallBusiness.com), I guess it’s launching right now. This is a blog about SmallBusiness.com, not a small business blog — however, I think we’ll be pointing to lots of bloggers who track the smallbizosphere. If you’re a MyBlogLog user, be sure to join the SmallBusiness.com Weblog’s community.
Another suggestion: if you maintain a weblog for or about a small business topic, or about your small business, don’t forget to add a link to SmallBusiness.com’s Weblog Directory. It’s has grown rather large and is now divided into different categories.
*After a strange crash of a previous iteration of blog tracking the development of SmallBusiness.com, I tried a blog-like thing within the wiki, itself. However, I’m more comfortable with a blog than with a blog-like thing, so we decided to begin a new development blog rather than attempt to resurrect the old one.
The white-coat gang at 
While 
*Background and disclosure: Hammock Publishing today owns SmallBusiness.com, so one might assume I’d like to perpetuate the myth that the news today is all about the value of a URL. (Granted, it has quite a bit of intrinsic value, as a Google search for the term “small business” will display.) From 2000-2002, SmallBusiness.com was owned by another venture that I and others invested in. That venture failed. Its failure was a classic, poster-child dot.com bust story. It sucked. It was, without a doubt, the worst experience of my professional — and in many ways, personal, life. After archiving the content of that earlier iteration of SmallBusiness.com for three years, I launched a wiki-platform small-business knowledge base on SmallBusiness.com last year. The site is an avocation, passion and laboratory at this time. But, hey, I’m an entrepreneur, so go figure. Another disclosure: I’m a long-time fan of Business.com founder Jake Winebaum, from his magazine entrepreneurship days and of Work.com and Business.com editor 
Over the past week or so, Anita Campbell of 
We’ve added some features (I call them conversational features, but “social” works) to 
