Web Directions

Presentations about online communities

Podcasts, slides, videos and more

Laurel Papworth — The business of being social

• In: Resources
• By: jessie
• June 19, 2008
• 1 Comment

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 10.45am.

It’s not true that there are no proven mon­eti­sa­tion mod­els for online com­mu­ni­ties; in fact, there are dis­tinct rev­enue streams that have been suc­cess­ful over many years. This ses­sion looks at the soft returns on invest­ment for engag­ing with user gen­er­ated con­tent, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion with the con­sumer and then moves into how social net­works earn money for their investors and developers.

The aim of this ses­sion is to limit the slap­ping of ban­ner ads on every niche com­mu­nity online — you might be sur­prised to learn that the least prof­itable rev­enue model is… Advertising! Come, spend an hour on the Dark Side, and find out which social net­works are mak­ing money, how much and by what means and learn about the busi­ness mod­els in this growth industry.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Grant Young — Strategies for social media engagement

• In: Resources, cool, trends
• By: jessie
• June 19, 2008
• No Comments

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 11.45am.

With so many social net­works bloom­ing, all with dif­fer­ent par­tic­i­pants and meth­ods of inter­ac­tion, it can be hard to deter­mine where to invest your energy, time and $$.

The ses­sion will pro­vide ideas and a “back­ground brief­ing” to help you answer the question:

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Angela Beesley — Wikis and community collaboration

• In: Resources
• By: Maxine
• September 29, 2007
• No Comments

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.

In this ses­sion, Angela Beesley will explain how Wikia is not only host­ing but actively devel­op­ing wikis and cre­at­ing hun­dreds of thriv­ing com­mu­ni­ties. The meth­ods and processes that have led Wikipedia to be the world’s largest ency­clo­pe­dia can be adopted for any type of wiki use, includ­ing edu­ca­tional and busi­ness com­mu­ni­ties. Using exam­ples from suc­cess­ful online wiki com­mu­ni­ties, Angela will explain how to enable a wiki com­mu­nity to man­age itself, and how to min­imise the com­mon prob­lems that wikis have, includ­ing ways to deal with unhelp­ful or unre­li­able infor­ma­tion, lack of adop­tion of a wiki, and the prob­lems of mali­cious edits on open wikis.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

George Oates — Human traffic

• In: Resources
• By: Maxine
• September 29, 2007
• No Comments

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.

If there’s one thing about Web 2.0, it’s that we’re real­is­ing that there are actu­ally peo­ple using the inter­net. It’s no longer about Human to Computer inter­ac­tion, but rather Human to Human. Discover some of the user expe­ri­ence ideas and strate­gies behind the design of flickr​.com, one of the rich­est Human to Human places on the web today.

See the slides and hear the podcast »

Laurel Papworth — The business of online communities

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30, 2006
• No Comments

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

It seems that every­one is talk­ing about user gen­er­ated con­tent and online com­mu­ni­ties these days. But how will cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism, user-​​generated con­tent, the Blogosphere, tag­ging, rank­ing, and Wiki knowl­edge reshape brand­ing and your busi­ness? How do you man­age and scale this com­mu­nity and then hand con­trol to your users (and how do you explain to the boss what you’ve just done?). Gain an under­stand­ing that dia­logue is the new con­tent and learn how to max­imise the ben­e­fits (and min­imise the pit­falls) of cre­at­ing online com­mu­ni­ties in this pre­sen­ta­tion. See the slides and hear the podcast »

Mark Pesce — Youbiquity

• In: Resources
• By: Guy Leech
• September 30, 2006
• 3 Comments

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

The col­lec­tion of social and infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies infor­mally known as Web2.0 have cre­ated a rich uni­verse of appli­ca­tions — but a scat­ter­shot one. We plug lots of our infor­ma­tion into web­sites every­where — MySpace and Digg, Friendster and Yahoo!, and every­where, Google, Google, Google. Yet it’s as if we’re spend­ing all of our time build­ing infor­ma­tion silos; piles of data which are essen­tially uncon­nected. It’s get­ting dull. How many times do I need to list my friends, or my con­tact infor­ma­tion, or my favorite bands?

We know why it’s hap­pen­ing: com­mer­cial inter­ests are over­rul­ing the nat­ural pool­ing and shar­ing of infor­ma­tion that would actu­ally bring some util­ity to this moun­tain of data we’re gen­er­at­ing about our­selves. Yet the pres­sure to share is build­ing up: the recent explo­sive emer­gence of mash-​​ups, which jux­ta­pose two or three or more ser­vices in unique and valu­able ways shows us that the hybrid always trumps the thor­ough­bred. And that’s just on inter­net ser­vices. Very few of us con­trol the moun­tain of data we gen­er­ate as we pass through this world — every­one wants it (for their own pur­poses), yet we — who are cre­at­ing it — never have access to it.

It’s time to revisit the entire phi­los­o­phy of inter­ac­tion design on the Web, time to move the focus away from the site-​​as-​​resource, toward an idea of the site-​​as-​​personal-​​enabler. What we each bring to a web­site — or rather, what we should bring to a web­site — is a wealth of infor­ma­tion about our­selves. This is the real resource of Web2.0, and the next place the Web is going. The exu­ber­ance around social net­works shows us that peo­ple want to con­nect — it’s time for design­ers to build the tools which will truly enable that con­nec­tion. See the slides and hear the podcast »