Bloglines - Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web

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Portals and KM This blog shares ideas and hopes to generate discussion on the use of portals, blogs, and knowledge management to provide value to organizations through practical applications. New trends and technologies are covered with a switch to art, music, travel, and food on the weekends.

Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web By Bill Ives on trends: web 2.0 CNN offered an interesting article, Why commercial Wikis don't work: Crowdsourcing has been a giant hit for the Web 2.0 set -- so why won't it work for bigger, more mainstream enterprises? It covers some successes and failures in group content creation. The main point can be summed up in this excerpt. "…Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Flickr organize people into literally millions of accessible walled gardens. Each one allows you to take part in tending the growth of that tiny space -- that encyclopedia entry, that Flickr "tag. By tirelessly nurturing their specific communities, not by randomly "crowdsourcing," Wales, Butterfield, Fake and their ilk encourage responsible gardening. Wiki novels, Wiki op-eds, a Wiki Amazon: these are concepts too large, too uncontrolled, too wilderness-like - too unwalled - to be gardens. Either nothing grows at all there, or the good ideas get strangled by weeds." So foster very focused content creation and stay away from trying to do too broad and ill defined a topic like writing a group novel. Success can come on a focused site or on a site that promotes and support multiple niche content areas like the Wikipedia. The article gives a nice niche example, the Lostpedia, "a Wikipedia-like site created by fans of the ABC series Lost who are all trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and sharing their notes." There is also the Intelipedia operating inside the Intel firewall to collect definitions of key work related concepts. Link