Creating a sustainable community at Scienceblogs

[A longer version of this is at SpreadingScience]

by D’Arcy Norman

I wrote this in response to a comment left by David Croty – who is one of the guys at the great site, The Scholarly Kitchen – at my previous post on the blowup at Scienceblogs.

The inherent problem is that the best interests of the company running the social network often are in direct opposition to the users of that social network. In the case of Facebook, their profits are going to be reliant on selling out the privacy of their users. In the case of ScienceBlogs, commercialization alienated the strongly anti-business, anti-industry members of their community and threatened their perceptions of themselves as an elite and well-respected group of experts.

One can, as you suggest, focus instead on serving those users but that’s a mighty difficult thing to monetize. If you’re a corporation with investors who would like to be paid back (like Seed Media), you need some way to make money. Perhaps running social networks will fall out of fashion as a profit-making enterprise due to these conflicts.

It was getting pretty long so I made it a post.

David, That is part of what I am trying to delineate. Scienceblogs went and created this community of blogs, hoping it would drive more traffic to their magazine and its website. But the magazine failed and the magazine website is not making nearly the inroads as the Scienceblogs are.

Seed Media simply did not realize that Scienceblogs had become this community – any group that can decide to strike is a community of people – with an focus independent of Seed..

Its business model for these blogs simply is not sustainable, even if it was full of pro-business, pro-industry people. Seed as looking for a bunch of well-written, independent voices. They got those in spades. The writers are always going to be independent, to the detriment of Seed when their motives conflict. Which it is almost bound to do because Seed’s focus was on getting advertising money, not on servicing the community created by the bloggers. A similar problem is seen in newspapers.

[More at SpreadingScience]

One of the best snarky but true satirical articles ever about Apple

The ever-arrogant Apple
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Following the Antennagate news conference, certain critics quickly concluded that Apple was acting like its usual arrogant self,” Ken Segall blogs. “I couldn’t agree more.”

“How dare Apple think they can make this problem go away with a free case that makes the problem go away,” Segall writes. “They need to suffer more than that.”

[More]

There are so many juicy nuggets in here. (It looks like the site may be getting hammered as going to the web page results in an Internal Server error. Just try later.)

Another taste:

Look what they’ve done to the world’s developers, telling them to write specifically for iPhone rather than just port over apps designed for less capable phones. Compounding their sin, they have the unrelenting gall to insist that apps meet some basic standards for quality and reliability. With their “our way or the highway” attitude, Apple takes choice away from customers, forcing them to settle for a library of only 225,000 apps.

It’s funny because it’s true. And a lot of people will think it is eal.It is an example of Poe’s Law applied to Apple (my bold).

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism (i.e. anti-Apple discourse) that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.

Could be a goldmine for Apple

by ˙Cаvin 〄

Apple plots new strategy to target small businesses through retail stores
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple has begun to focus on small, local businesses as part of a newly evolved strategy that aims to expand the company’s sales past the consumer market.

[More]

This could be really big. Small businesses could really take to the Mac mainly because the support costs are so much lower. Every small business that I have seen that used PCs spent a lot of time dealing with them simply not doing what people wanted for one reason or another. Things like microphones not working, emails not loading, updates crashing the system.

Meanwhile, every company using Macs can get by with very few support people who, when they do have a problem, can fix it rapidly. The need for a large support staff is negligible.

If Apple can get more of its computers into small businesses – and using the stores to provide support when needed – provides an opportunity that no other company can fill. It would be one stop shopping for the OS, the hardware and for support.

Looks like a win-win all around.