The Trendspotting blog offers a really great overview and analysis of a Telephia and comScore research project released released on May 14 that details their latest study of mobile vs. PC-based Internet usage in the UK and the US.

Research highlights:

UK and US mobile market are similarly developed: mobile market size in number of users is 19% out of the web pc market size.
Men under the age of 35 are the early adopters who are more likely to use mobile devices to access the Mobile Web
* Leading in the mobile web (January 07):
Popular pc internet sites Yahoo!, MSN and Google (both in the US and UK)
Popular in UK: BBC and SKY
Popular in the US: The Weather Channel and AOL

The trendspotting blog goes on to pose the question: Will social networks apps drive the mobile web?

Having the early adopters study in mind, and acknowledging the social networking sites success (55% of all of online American youths ages 12-17 use an online social networking sites, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project), where would you say a short messages social network as twitter mobile be in the next few months?

My questions about the study really center on unique users. I didn't see any data around overlap of mobile and pc users, meaning the study assumes you are either a mobile web user or a pc-based web user. Again, I may have overlooked the data. If this is a working assumption, I would think it was incorrect, as I bet there is as much as 50% (at least). Further, I wonder if the early adopter audience really makes a distinction between mobile and pc-based web experiences, form factor of the device aside?

One thing is for certain: Those of us who build online communities need to start paying attention to the mobile web now.

This morning's Washington Post has a very thoughtful article highlighting the what appears to be a growing trend in incidents of serious harassment against women bloggers online.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.

The article goes on to detail several women's experiences with online harassment, including Kathy Sierra.

If this is indeed a growing trend, it very disturbing, and very disappointing.

Full article here:
Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers

I've heard a lot of discussion around creating formal online community strategies in the last 6 months. I've also heard of (and experienced) community efforts that are stalled or even abandoned because of lack of a formal, codified strategy. Personally, I think this is just silly. Think about it: What if you had to come up with a formal communication strategy, put it into powerpoint, and shop it around to all the VPs before answering the phone the next time it rings? Whether you host one or not, your organization has a community that is networking, forming opinions about you, and growing stronger every day.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to encourage everyone to pursue creating online communities with reckless abandon here. What I am saying is that there are factors in play that make it easier, more beneficial and more crucial for you to engage in community building activities for your organization, if you haven't already.

As I mentioned in a previous post:
1. It's cheaper to engage in community-building activities. We've gone from 7 figure portals to free independent communities to 5 figure deployments for customer, large-scale sites.
2. It's faster to deploy. Days and weeks, not months or a year.
3. Community already exists. The fact is, your org or brand already has a community. If your customers aren't talking about your products or services online, you might be in big trouble.
4. Passionate customers have an appetite for engagement online (and to varying degrees, the flavors of less passionate customers). Customers have an expectation that your company is available and "present" online.
5. The value is starting to be measurable (but still difficult)

The reality is, for most companies it's close to impossible to create a buttoned up online community strategy at this point. Some reasons?
- In most companies, there is no ownership of community at the executive level
- Community responsibilities scattered over multiple organizations: support, marketing, online, product management, IT, to name a few.
- The expertise for creating this strategy typically isn't in house. It needs to be grown, contracted, or hired.
- ROI is difficult to clearly quantify at this point.
- The community at large is not employed by the company, and does not necessarily function in the organization's best interest. This tends to give execs, and particularly marketing and PR, fits.

What can you do?
Start with quick wins. Create a blog. Participate in other hosted discussion groups or online communities. Go to one of your user group meetings and get to know the attendees.Communities start with small networks and weak ties that grow larger and stronger over time. Even a single person in a large company can make a difference. Don't use lack of "strategy" as an excuse to not start a basic community engagement effort To my earlier analogy mashup: pick up the phone.

I just ran across Kaneva, which appears to be Second Life with an "out of world" social network and video sharing.

Looks for lots more competition for Linden Labs this year.

In other virtual world news, check out the Virtual Worlds conference. Thanks for the link Kellie P.

As host of the Online Community Camp, Forum One is especially excited about the Unconference book project. For the uninitiated, an unconference is a conference with an agenda and sessions driven entirely by the attendees.

The following quote from this Biz 2.0 article sums up the spirit of an unconference:
"We figured there was much more expertise in the audience than there possibly could be onstage," says BarCamp co-founder Ryan King.

The wisdom of crowds in action.

It's exciting that someone is writing a book about unconferences and that the book is being authored collaboratively on the web via a wiki. The project originated in India, and the project team is encouraging global contributors.

Very cool.

The project's genesis was at Wiki Camp 07 held in Chennai, where the project was announced by Jimmy Wales. Kiruba has more background on Wiki Camp, and some really cool photos of Jimmy visiting his house on his blog.

Thanks to the Somewhat Frank blog for the Unconference book link.

A recent article in InformationWeek asks "Has Social Networking Gone Too Far?"

The article primarily focuses on the recently launched redesign of the USA Today web site. An overview article from the USA Today touts many participatory features, like content rating, multiple article sources, discussion groups and uploading photos.

From the article:

"While we've refined the design, we've also expanded the journalistic mission: Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events," wrote editor Ken Paulson and executive editors Kinsey Wilson and John Hillkirk.

While I think this is an interesting evolution of an "old media" brand experience, it ignores the larger community ecosystem. People belong to many communities and frequent mutiple websites, even for the similar information.

The problem USA Today faces is that it wants to own a conversation that already spans multiple Web sites. "I don't believe that people in general, even people who are really partial to particular media outlets, are going to want to have a closed social media experience around a single Web site," (Stew) Boyd (of Blue Whale Labs) says.

Another sign that the team at USA Today doesn't get it? I clicked on a link from their home page to read an article about the redesign and was greeted by a full screen graphical pharma ad. Firefox also informed me that it had blocked 2 popups.

Most companies that sincerely attempt to engage with their audiences online have an epiphany in the process: they realize that by listening to what their community really wants, acting upon it, and by meeting their community's needs they generate business value.

I hope USA Today is paying attention to their conversation (277 comments and counting).

Has Social Networking Gone Too Far? Not even close.

Is this the beginning of the inevitable consolidation that seems to be coming in the online community space?

First it was Five Apart, a community platform company. Yesterday Cisco announced it was buying Tribe. Thanks to Mukund for the heads up.

From TechCrunch:
"The hope is to use the two company’s technology to help Cisco’s corporate clients build their own social networks, so it isn’t clear whether or not the Tribe service itself will live on."

Just to give a hint at what is to come, check out Jeremiah Owyang's comments on the infrastructure field being overcrowded and his list of 37 white label services.

What's going to drive / driving the explosion in online community interest? Some companies are starting to see real, tangible value from their communities (read: ROI). Other companies are comfortable with the investment for affinity purposes, especially when the investment is compared to other programs like brand campaigns and advertising... or even the cost of simple, global marcomm web sites. The rest are struggling to figure out a strategy, or simply just don't care.

My belief is that every organization that values their business, brand equity and customer base will figure out some sort of an online engagement with their audience over the next 2-3 years. This engagement will be a bi-directional and networked style of communication that will involve a sincere attempt at relationship building. Scoble said something a couple of years ago about every corporate web site being replaced by a blog at some point (sorry, couldn't find the post). At the time, I thought he was nuts. Now I think, at least in spirit, he was 100% on the mark.

Update: Meaning, not blogs per say, but the bi-directional and networked engagement I mentioned above.

What do you think?

Sounds like a lawfirm, eh?

The latest Biz 2.0 has an excellent article about Wikipedia, Wales new , for profit venture Wikia, and provides a good bit of insight into Wales himself.

One of the articles best quotes comes from Gil Penchia, CEO of Wikia, commenting on the company's mission:

"We are a for-profit company, but our investors and employees are equally focused on the social mission," Penchina says. "We hope to prove that you can build a sustainable business without copyrights, to serve our communities, and to enable advocacy on important topics like politics."

The article also has a great sidebar called "The Wales Rules for Web 2.0". There are 5:

1. Be Proactive

"I find the term 'crowdsourcing' incredibly irritating," Wales says. "Any company that thinks it's going to build a site by outsourcing all the work to its users not only disrespects the users but completely misunderstands what it should be doing. Your job is to provide a structure for your users to collaborate, and that takes a lot of work."

2. Be Transparent

"When you build a social network, you're asking people to use your facilities to build a community," Wales says. "If you have a lot of secret mechanisms that regulate your site, people aren't going to feel comfortable. It's about building trust."

3. Be Frugal

"You don't build a community by just pouring money into it. It takes time. You have to grow it in a healthy way," he (Wales) says.

4. Be True to Your Brand

"Really successful businesses and organizations build something so that people immediately know what they're about," Wales says. "You're building a level of trust so that people know what they're getting."

5. Be Trusting

"Some sites have a lot of controls to prevent bad behavior," Wales says. "But they end up preventing spontaneous good behavior."

Cnet news reports that the winner for a contest to create business plans for the virtual world Second Life was announced Monday.

"The honors, announced Monday, went to Minnesota-based Market Truths, which devised a market research and analysis system to help real-world companies figure out what works and what doesn't in the burgeoning virtual world."

Other finalists "submitted proposals--in order of finish in the contest--for a suite of in-world communications and collaborations tools, an in-world music distribution system and a reputation-based search engine."

The contest was co-sponsored by Edelman and the Electric Sheep Company.

The winner recieved $350,000 Linden dollars (~$1300 usd) as well as the use of an island for 6 months.

File Under: Interesting, but not all that compelling yet. That particular file for Second Life is getting awfully full.