article: Evite takes on Zagat, RedHerring, 10/13/04

More social networking…

 

Evite takes on Zagat’s

The party-planning web site launches a bar and restaurant guide.

October 13, 2004

 

Evite.com, the free social-planning site, plans to announce Thursday the launch of an additional service which will feature bar and restaurant reviews powered by social networking.

 

This new feature will allow Evite users to make decisions based on personal recommendations from friends and colleagues about where to go and what to do, said Evite President John Foley. The service also will be stocked with 1 million reviews of bars and restaurants provided by Evite’s sister site Citysearch - both sites are owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp in Los Angeles.

 

As Evite touted its refurbished site as a unique entry into the already crowded social networking space, industry insiders said it was no different from such sites as Zagat Survey, Yahoo!, Friendster, Tribe, and Meetup. Analysts also questioned the new site’s advertising-only business model, which has not yet proven to be a moneymaker for similar sites.

“In general, people are not going to use a web site for a typical dinner,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp.com, a social networking web site based in San Francisco. Mr. Stoppelman pointed to Yahoo! as a potential challenger for Evite because it has separate features for party planning and restaurant reviews. The only thing missing at Yahoo! is a connection between the two, he said.

 

That is Evite’s unique selling point, said Mr. Foley - there are no other web sites that offer similar services.

 

“It’s a totally new value proposition,” said Mr. Foley. “I follow the social networking players closely and I don’t know anyone who is going directly after what we are doing.”

 

For the rest of the article go here

 

Wikipedia users are defining politics - Bigger than Jesus

Complete article here: Wiki wars

Red Herring

Wikipedia users are defining politics   When it comes to political trash-talking, there’s no finer place than the Internet. Leave it to the net-heads to duke out their differences in an online encyclopedia. Wikipedia.com allows users to easily edit encyclopedia entries on its interactive web site. Needless to say, “Bush” and “Kerry” are the two most edited entries on the entire site. The presidential hopefuls beat out both Jesus and Hitler as the most defined and redefined personages on the page. You too can change your definitional destiny in the world of wiki, but before you dive into definition editing, check out Red Herring’s Wiki wars.   Bigger than Jesus Indeed, entries for Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have become the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia, said Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikipedia Foundation, which is based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have created even more debate than entries for sex and religion. As of October 8, Wikipedia’s President Bush entry had been tweaked 3,953 times. Its entry for Senator Kerry had been modified 3,230 times. By contrast, Wikipedia’s article on Jesus has only been edited 1,855 times since the site’s inception in 2001.      Complete article here: Wiki wars

 

 

WSJ to open up all online content? (for a week....)

WSJ to open up all online content?  (for a week....)

 

From Rafat Ali’s amazingly informative daily newsletter www.paidcontent.org.

 

These two notes below link to the same story by Mark Glaser, very worth reading if you are interested in the topic of online content business models

 

But the question remains…what exactly is a viable business model for online content?  Clearly the walled-subscription and premium content business models are not working.

My notes on this subject are here:

http://typaldos-expertise.blogspot.com/2004/09/online-content-business-models.html

 

WSJ.com To Open Up Site For One Week: That's the news bit coming out of the OJR story (also linked below): WSJ.com will also open up the entire site for five days starting November 8. This comes after the site started opening up one story a day through RSS and Google News, for bloggers to link to...
WSJ.com editor Bill Grueskin: "Between Google News and everything else, we had to decide how to open them up, and it's something I don't have the answer to yet." [Oct.20, 04] | WSJ |

Open Season For News Sites: Mark Glaser round up some of the recent developments in online media industry: sites such as the BBC and News.com are linking more outside their domains, and WSJ.com and NYTimes.com are opening up more complimentary content in a nod to the "news conversation" online. Call it the blog effect, really...
Richard Deverell, head of BBC News Interactive: "I think Google News has been a shot across the bow of all news originators, making us say 'hold on, there's a different way of doing this.' It's very easy to flip between different sources of news. We either try to reverse that trend, which is likely futile, or we facilitate it, and I'm keen that we take the latter route." [Oct.20, 04] | Newspapers |