“I think [fixed prices] will disappear online, simply because it is possible–cheap and easy–to vary prices online.” That was MIT Media Lab’s Patti Maes in 1999, at a time when eBay’s business was booming and auctions were seen as the future of ecommerce. Flash forward 9 years, and BusinessWeek is today calling online auctions a dying breed, Nick Carr is wondering if auctions were a fad. Indeed, the fixed price (”Buy it Now” only) format is beginning to dominate eBay, and the company has taken recent steps push fixed price even harder. But the death knell of the online auction format is not eBay’s biggest problem–no, that would be the small exodus of sellers from the site.
Last week, computer book publisher SitePoint relayed a story about recent experiences with Digg that demonstrates that the Digg system is far from perfect. We’ve written recently on ReadWriteWeb about the decline and fall of quality on Digg, but SitePoint’s anecdote demonstrates that sometimes the wisdom of crowds approach is, well, kind of dumb.
With diesel prices in the U.S. hovering at just under $4/gallon nationally–up over a dollar from last year–independent truckers especially are starting to feel pain at the pump as operating costs are driven higher and higher. One idea to combat the all-time high fuel prices that’s apparently being kicked around inside the trucking community is a protest strike. As we’re seeing with a growing number of social movements, the organization of this idea seems to be coming together through online channels like social networks and forums.
Last July, while the seventh Harry Potter book was setting sales records, we wrote a post detailing how to write and publish a book from start to finish. At the time, Lulu was easily the best self-service print-on-demand option available to fledgling authors. With limited fees, a thriving community and distribution options that made it easy (relatively speaking) to get your book on store shelves, it was a no-brainer for many writers. Since that time, though, things have changed, and the burgeoning print-on-demand industry is starting to come into its own.
The problem with running a site that relies heavily on users to generate content is that it puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of those users (in relation to the site owners). If users are unhappy with something about the way a site that relies on user-generated content is run, they can theoretically hold the site hostage until they get what they want. This week, eBay sellers unhappy with the auction giant’s recent change in listing prices and policy launched a week-long boycott of the site. So far, the impact appears negligible, but the action highlights a risk that any business that relies on a UGC-centric model takes.
Yesterday marked Facebook’s four year anniversary, or to look at it from the college perspective to which the site owes its success: Facebook graduated. Washington Post assistant editor Rachel Dry, who was a senior at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his college dorm room on February 4, 2004, wrote a commencement address for The New Republic. In it, Dry wonders if Facebook is taking “on the big inequities,” as Bill Gates — like Zuckerberg, a famous Harvard dropout — urged in his commencement speech at the university last year. We wondered the same thing.
According to Forrester Research, there will be “strong demand” for Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise in 2008. Even though 42% of enterprises say adding Web 2.0 tools is not on their agenda, according to a Q3 2007 survey, Forrester expects that half of those will change their mind and embrace Web 2.0 tools by [...]
Besides being the day that Macworld crashed Twitter, today was also Wikipedia’s seventh birthday. In the seven years since Wikipedia was publicly launched on Jan. 15, 2001, the online encyclopedia has put up some impressive numbers. The flagship English language version now has 2,174,371 articles (as I write this), is the ninth most popular site on the Internet (according to Alexa), and has spawned six side projects (Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, and Wikiversity).
Ah, what a difference a caucus makes. In November, when ABC and Facebook announced their partnership for U.S. political coverage we, like many other tech pundits, expressed skepticism. We noted that polls on the Facebook politics section were drawing just around 1,000 participants–”a microscopic number” compared to the 17 million US members of voting age [...]
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