Community is Community, Online and Offline

Micro Persuasion points me to a piece of research about the fact that:

The online world is just as important as the real world, feel a large portion of internet users in the United States. […] 43 per cent of internet users who are members of online communities „feel as strongly“ about their virtual community as their real world community.

I wonder if those figures are similar in Germany or Europe in general. What also means, especially for us marketers: build a strong community around your brand (in any way possible: blogs, forums, etc.) and you should – in theory – reach a certain level of relevance and „feel strongly“-factor for your brand.

Boo.com to relaunch (should we be scared?)

TechCrunch writes about Boo.com launching again. Weren’t they the ones that „started“ the burst of the first bubble in 2000/2001?

In 1999 Boo.com, a fashion retail site, burnt through $120 million in six months […] Founded by Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, Boo.com’s largest backer was Omnia, a fund backed by members of Lebanon’s wealthy Hariri family, which put nearly $40 million into the company. Over 400 staff and contractors were made redundant when Boo went into receivership in May 2000.

Is it good or bad, if they come back? Not sure, but you better watch out 😉

(hat tip)

Homophily, Serendipity and Social Software

I have been into this discussion of Serendipity and Homophily for a while. I consider this an extremely interesting topic that arises with all the discussion about how digital changes information usage and value. But also personal surroundings, user behaviour, group thinking, etc. Some time ago I found an interesting post: O’Reilly Radar „Homophily in Social Software“

In short, you hang out with people who are like you, a phenomenon known as homophily. This happens online, and indeed the Internet can lower the costs of finding people like you. But homophily raises the question for social software designers of how much they should encourage homophily and how much they want to mix it up.

So the internet is – according to this sofar – the main cause of homophily:

It’s often been asked whether this filtering just encourages people to see the news that supports their prejudices and never see news that counters them.

I don’t think so. There are tips of how you can avoid that and provide more serendipity:

Doing this creates serendipity: pleasantly surprising the user. For example, don’t show just the top 10 most similar items in your recommendations list, but show the eight most similar and two from the mid-range. Or call the „less relevant but also likely to be interesting“ results out like you’re advertising them: put a heading like „Take a walk on the wild side“ or „Break out“ on top and act like it’s a feature you’re offering, not a bug you’re fixing.

I think that most platforms will do that quite well. Purely, because people are too different to have too many alike recommendations. There will always be people who add new input to the recommendation system. And secondly, this variable increase, the more likes&dislikes from other parts of life are taken into consideration. If you shop at amazon for books, but the recommendation system takes your preferences for food into account when offering books, you get to see books from people who enjoy the same type of food and read books you might never have heard or thought of…
However, just to make this complete: TechDirt doesn’t believe in technical recommendation systems, though.

And read/write web has an interview with the chief architect StumbleUpon, one of the major „serendipity engines“, if you like.

Tagging vs. Cataloging

An interesting post by Chiara Fox, a senior information architect on tagging vs. cataloging.

Tagging differs from traditional cataloging in a number of ways. First, tagging no longer belongs solely to the world of librarians and indexers: now anyone can tag and describe assets. And not only is it possible for any user to apply a tag, but in some systems (such as Flickr), users can even add tags to other peoples’ assets.

It’s nothing groundbreaking new, but a good summary of folksonomies vs taxonomies. My favourite quote:

tagging has brought metadata to the masses

How to Succeed in 2007

Business 2.0 asked 50 influential people How to Succeed in 2007.

A few outtakes I enjoyed:

None of these sound like they’re especially relevant for only 2007, but that’s why I enjoy them even more.