Need Help Providing Internet Education to the Disadvantaged

The skinny here is that I’d like to work on correcting the uneven access to Internet jobs (great jobs, btw) by providing education to the disadvantaged. By disadvantaged I mean — here in New York City — mainly blacks and Hispanics, but generally those with lower income. I’m not sure how organizations who provide such services identify customers in this segment. I’ve already got some plans in the works for an educational service, and a small but important component of it is figuring out how to make the education available more widely.

Lately this has become a hotter topic in the blogosphere — with Kottke sparking a thread and Zeldman, Nick, Mike, and Anil supporting this point of view.

Someone asked, Where are the barriers then? Here’s a few:

Welcome Fast Company Readers!

Noise Between Stations is an official FC Read. A big welcome to first timers. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what kind of design-innovation-internet topics interest you.

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Netflix’s Competitive Advantage

I’m developing a new course, Introduction to Internet Business Strategy, that I’m pretty excited about. Ironically, though everyone in the Internet industry discusses strategy, it’s difficult to find any standard references on the topic. This presents a great opportunity for me to plunge in and synthesize the basics as well as to examine what role design has played so far.

Netflix home page One company I’m reverse engineering is Netflix. The store-less video subscription service claims to bethe world’s largest online movie rental service, providing more than 6.3 million subscribers access to more than 70,000 DVD titles.” They have an impressive physical presence too: “Netflix operates 42 shipping centers located throughout the United States… On average, Netflix ships 1.575 million DVDs each day.” And though they compete against giant Blockbuster as well as smaller chains and neighborhood shops as well as video-on-demand services, earnings have doubled each year the past three years.

So how do they do it?

CenterNetworks — Business on the New Internet

Just discovered this, and it looks like a good resource:

CenterNetworks was relaunched in September 2006 to focus on the “new” Internet. This includes social networking, Web 2.0, and social lending. One of my main goals with CenterNetworks is to help you create better web apps. Not so much on the coding side but on the business side. To help you, we provide content in the following areas:

* Site Reviews
* News
* Insights
* Interviews
* Conference Coverage

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The Social Media Bandwagon

So big companies are adopting social media. As they take a shortcut by buying software from BigCo-friendly vendors like Pluck, one has to wonder how long it’ll take before customers experience social media fatigue.

And, in the rush to install the software, I wonder if they even think about being in competition with Blogger, Flickr, and the other quite-good industry leaders? In the past I’ve seen many efforts to consider vertical search just to realize that everyone doing search is competing with Google. I wonder if the same realization will come with social media, or if social media will simply become the new paradigm for most media?

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12 Tenets of Social Media Marketing

The 12 Tenets of Social Media Marketing

I. The public is the Lord thy God
II. Thou shalt covet all media
III. Ignore not peer-to-peer media
IV. Thou shalt think globally and speak in tongues
V. Thy communications must pass the “who cares?” test
VI. Thou shalt learn to create artful blog and forum comments
VII. Thou shalt not talk shit
VIII. Thou shalt not make someone else speak for thee
IX. Thou shalt not refuse to comment when thy company is under fire
X. Concern thyself with thy overall marketing strategy
XI. Give they brand to the consumer
XII. Remember: thou must keep holy the Internet.

Amen.

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A New Internet Strategy Course

Though there is much punditry on the topic, I’ve found a paucity of books, classes, and other educational materials about Internet strategy. Guessing Internet practitioners would appreciate a formal review, I’ve created a course called Introduction to Internet Business Strategy and will be teaching it first at the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas this March.

If you can’t make it to Vegas, I’ll be teaching it again in New York soon thereafter. Stay tuned.

Americans Online

The NY Times covers the new census figures…

Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.

Do Customer Communities Pay Off?

In HBR this month is a rare, methodical (and free) look at the financial effect of online communities via a study of eBay Germany…

Over the course of a year, we compared the behavior of community enthusiasts and lurkers with that of the control group. The differences were astonishing. Lurkers and community enthusiasts bid twice as often as members of the control group, won up to 25% more auctions, paid final prices that were as much as 24% higher, and spent up to 54% more money (in total). Enthusiasts listed up to four times as many items on eBay and earned up to six times as much in monthly sales revenues as the control users. The findings on first-time sellers were even more impressive: Compared with the controls, almost ten times as many lurkers (56.1%) and enthusiasts (54.1%) started selling on eBay after they joined and participated in customer communities.

The challenge for companies now is remembering that creating community means getting like-minded groups of people together to do things they like doing and not just installing some community software.

BarCampNYC2

Entrepreneurial Improv Theater

BarCampNYC2 happened last weekend and was a great time. Holding it in the Microsoft offices was a little spooky, but at least that turned up some booty.

More than anything I was surprised at how little code talk there was compared to start up and design talk. Sessions like Entrepreneurial Improv Theater were a great chance for everyone to practice their VC pitching skills. Though it was obvious how hard it is for any one person, myself included, to make their brain stretch from code to UI design to product design to organization building to marketing to finance etc. I was impressed to see everyone try that stretch then collaborate to combine their skills.

Chaulk One Up for Blogs: The Satorialist

The Satorialist has suddenly made a big splash in both the blogging and fashion worlds with a very simple idea: take photos of wonderfully-dressed everyday people on the street and post them on a blog. The author’s eye and insightful commentary create little moments of education and beauty. We knew about the threats to classifieds and news and encyclopedias, and this peck at the high-media establishment further demonstrates that everything — even the insular fashion publishing world — is subject to the democratization of publishing.

Next time you’re at the bookstore have a look around and wonder what wouldn’t benefit from a simpler or more social approach or a whole new perspective.

This photo is titled, What Every American Boy Dreams Parisian Girls Look Like. Sigh.

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