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Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

Recently we released our first premium report: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It's been in the works for more than four months and we believe it's unlike anything else you've seen. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.

The end product is in two parts. Part one is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. Part two is a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. The Guide is available for purchase at a price of $299. (You won't be charged until you complete a few simple steps on that page.) You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Trends

Web 3.0 or Not, There's Something Different About 2009

This week ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus gave a short presentation at a local event, Webstock Mini, in which he looked at some of the trends we're seeing in Web Technology this year. The presentation is embedded below. He gave the term 'Web 3.0' a bit of a ribbing. But his overall theme was that there is indeed a difference in the products we're seeing in 2009, compared to the ones we saw at the height of 'Web 2.0' (2005-08).

Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care

Last week we discussed how the current era of the Web is evolving. One of the concepts we noted was Linked Data, an idea whose time has come in 2009. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave a must-view talk at the TED Conference earlier this year, evangelizing Linked Data. He said that Linked Data was a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We've gone from a Web of documents, via the WWW, to a Web of data. Berners-Lee is now on a crusade for everyone from government departments, to individuals, to open up their data and put it on the Web - so that others can link to it and use it. In this post we give a high-level overview of Linked Data. Read on to stop and smell the roses.

Report: Mint Considers Selling Anonymized Data from Its Users

According to a report from Bloomberg this week, Mint.com's CEO Aaron Patzer is considering selling anonymized data about the service's users. Mint, the online personal finance aggregator, obviously sits on a lot of very interesting data, some of which the company has shared on its blog now and then. Given that this was just a short interview, the details about this plan are more than vague, and it would be interesting to know what kind of data Mint might be planning to sell. What is clear, though, is that Mint will have to be very careful if it doesn't want to scare away its customers.

Baratunde Thurston on Content Curation, Real-Time Search, and "Analytics Porn"

In New York City, on the 16th floor of the Roger Smith Hotel, we caught up with social media superhero Baratunde Thurston, web editor for The Onion. Thurston started getting into this whole "Internet" thing in simpler times when the social web was called Usenet. He now carves out his niche at the overlap of the Venn diagram of comedy, politics, and tech. As an official Internet old-timer who makes it his business to stay relevant, Thurston has particularly useful insights on the business of curating applicable content with great efficiency and timeliness.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Smub, a bookmarking and link posting tool for the iPhone.
• Power Reviews, get the facts about customer reviews.
• Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
• Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• hakia is a semantic search engine.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
• Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteStart

Our new channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Finding the Right Wave to Ride (Secular Trends)

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

Surfing sure sounds like more fun than work, but when you catch a technology or market wave just right, it seems almost as good. But you need the right-sized wave.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Dam Just Broke: Facebook Opens Up to OpenID

This week Facebook became the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies' websites. Major networks have said for months that their ID could be used as OpenID, but becoming "relying parties" that accepted OpenID from elsewhere was the step everyone was waiting for. The dam has broken. It's ironic that it's Facebook that did it. Facebook is probably the most closed of all the major social networks (other than LinkedIn) and is so far ahead of everyone else in market share that traditional logic would argue that they have no interest in this kind of interoperability. This is the kind of step that was expected from networks more open and, frankly, far behind Facebook. Nevertheless, it has happened and it's big news.

Is This The Future of the iPhone? Push, Background, Bundles

Version 3.0 of the iPhone operating system is in beta testing among developers and if all the actual and rumored changes come to fruition, the iPhone user experience is likely to be very different soon. In this post we'll take a brief look at three of the biggest changes being talked about: push notifications, background apps and bundled software. Some of these changes are much more likely than others. We've also got a few fantasies about what we wish was coming soon to the iPhone.

Pandora Expects to Make a Profit in 2010 - Still Growing Rapidly

We have seen our fair share of doom and gloom this year, but, according to a report from Bloomberg.com, at least Pandora, the free online music discovery service, expects to be profitable next year. Pandora was founded in in 2000, and derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes. In the interview with Bloomberg, Pandora's founder Tim Westergreen also disclosed that the service is currently adding about 50,000 new users a day, and that the service's successful iPhone app is responsible for bringing in about 20,000 of these new users.

Business Cards Suck: Try These Tools Instead

Business cards are a horror show. When it gets to the point that you have to either resort to a die-cut, motion-sensitive, titanium-plated laser show of a card or get your contact info embossed on beef jerky to avoid being forgotten in the trash heap of useless swag and Clif Bar crumbs at the bottom of some biz dev guy's carry-on, we think it's safe to admit that the whole business card milieu needs an attitude adjustment. Here are a few cool, tech-forward tools to ensure neither you, nor your contact details, are lost in the shuffle.

Digg: Shouts Out, Share on Facebook and Twitter In

During Digg's Townhall (embedded in the post) this week, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced that the shout feature on Digg will be removed later this week to be replaced with a new share option that will "streamline your ability to share on Facebook and Twitter." A Digg spokesperson told us that "we've elected to remove shouts in favor of more popular sharing options, based on user feedback and broader market research." The new share feature will also include an e-mail option.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.