A Day in Paradise

Don Dodge coined Web2.0 as “Web App + 2 Founders + 0 Revenue”. Funny, and not too far off the money.

Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.

One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.

Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.

One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.

I have had an active account at backpackit for the last 2 years, I used it for a lot of different collaborative writing I was doing until Google Docs started kicking ass google style and I decided to move to that.

Now that I have several hundred documents in google docs, I am wondering how I can get my old stuff off of backpackit, and preferably into google docs. Backpackit advertises an XML exports, but it only gets a handful of titles and none of the several hundred articles that I have up there.

I found this, a bit crude but I guess it will do the trick.

This interesting post describes one or the reasons why PEAR/PECL doesn’t allow (L)GPL code in the repositories

The problem that I’ve stumbled upon is that Ruby’s Gem repository is full of randomly licensed code, including lots of GPL stuff. At the very least, this information ought to be very visible so that it’s possible to weed out any GPL’ed libraries. At best, the Ruby guys would only accept MIT/BSD licensed code for the standard repository.

I am of the opinion that small snippets of code serve everyone best when released into the public domain.