I’m up way too late writing an article on Yepic about my favorite business books and books that have influenced me.

Pieces of this are on my blog, but nowhere in one place. This will be a good reference for me. Unfortunately, I don’t get time to read as many books as I have in the past.

If you have anything to add about the article (more links or resources) let me know janet@affiliateflash.com or the contact link above. It’s the most involved article I’ve put on Yepic so far. Please rate me as an author or the article while you’re there.

Skip McGrath blogs about selling content on Ebay. He wrote a book about it.

Yepic is out of beta so anyone can post articles now. You can invite people to collaborate and give feedback. You can list your articles on Ebay (I want an article about people who make money on Yepic, since it’s very new I wonder if anyone is yet), or sell them on Yepic.

Try it out!

Compete.com asked: “which websites are more successful in capturing
our attention compared to others?” or where do we spend the most time online?

The top 20 domains attract almost 40 percent of the average websurfer’s time. I’m guessing 80% of that time is spent on MySpace.com - a community. MySpace takes up 12 percent of the total time spent anywhere on the Web. Users spent almost 28 billion minutes at MySpace in December (math wizards, how many hours is that a day?)

Yahoo! and its properties capture 8.5 percent of our time, followed
by MSN and eBay with 3.7 percent, Google with 2.1 percent, and AOL
with 1.7 percent.

The Top Ten Websites Ranked by Total Time Spent

1. Myspace
2. Yahoo
3. MSN
4. eBay
5. Google
6. AOL
7. Pogo
8. Facebook
9. Amazon
10. Craigslist

I want to write this story. The story of a great company being formed right here in Utah. I predict it will contribute most to the changing of how information is bought and sold. It challenges old school media and power.

In the past many of the tools that do this have been for geeks. Geeks that get mad when someone ruins their fun by getting money involved. Geeks that want to protect their fortresses by making the barrier to entry too high for the average person to scale.

This takes geek concepts and makes them elegant and invites rather than eschews making money for doing it. I love the Craigslists, the Wikipedias, the Diggs. But how do you fit making money in that’s not supported by advertising? Most rely on that.

Information is the perfect product to sell because it has a high initial intellectual cost (for practical, useful, well-presented content). And it can be sold again and again.

eBay boasts over 100K content listings a month! The delivery of that purchase is clunky. You pay and at some point someone sends you a document, usually by email. But you want you it now, and you want quality. Who’s going to facilitate that? What companies are forming or going to form by doing content fulfilment? How can you more seemlessly get the content you bought off eBay? (or any other marketplace where content is sold).

If you can deliver it to the right person at the right time you will make money. Yepic allows this. It’s a true web 2.0 company.

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of community online. Like any community for it to be of value there must be give and take. Sometimes companies claim to be web 2.0 which means they utilize (or abuse) social media to make money. When true web 2.0, unadulterated, is two-sided.

When people take and never give, they ruin community. If people aren’t being completely open about who they are or their intentions it lowers the quality of the interaction.

Wikipedia, Craigs list, Fat Wallet and Digg don’t want the quality of interaction ruined by marketers or commercial interests. They actively discourage it.

Marketers are evil people who want to make a buck off you. That’s means they can be less than transparent. But they (we) exist. My question is how do we give them a place and let them participate in the community while keeping quality?

How do you monetize or even allow for and encourage making money online in a web 2.0 community? To make it do you need to be bought out by a large company? Depend on ad sales? Sell links? (Now this is not a bad idea. A paid box on every page of Wikipedia. Companies can buy a link given it honestly provides a service that compliments the content. Maybe take submissions, have the community vote on them. The companies who win pay to keep it there or charge a one-time fee).

I’m a Yepic evangelist (a role I volunteered myself for) because they solve this problem of web 2.0 communities. A problem I’ve been thinking about a lot this year. They encourage and facilitate getting paid or paying others for their contribution. There’s also a lot of free content.

Lunch may not be completely free but it’s affordable. And making money is encouraged. Content that is incredibly popular or useful can be sold over and over (unlike journalism where you get paid once for an article).
People will be able to make a living or supplement their incomes with Yepic. By buying, selling, editing, creating additions, services, and enhancements for their or other people’s content.

It’s a beautiful thing.

Today I had lunch with the two founders of Yepic, Corey and Richard. Too bad I was listening too much to think of taking a picture. It was a complete mind trip.

I’m prone to hero worship at times. My heroes are people who excel and who get and/or see things that other people don’t. They do it naturally. If they are humble about it I love it even more.

These two are forming a brilliant business. I can’t even wrap my head around the potential and the beauty of their model. I predict that it will become The Web 2.0 marketplace for content. Forget article sites and other flat ways of presenting content.

This works especially well for practical, useful information. Information that makes people better able to do things. Information that makes them smarter. Rich, meaningful, and integrated.

And they are going to enable information that evolves and improves (with collaboration). Most importantly they will make it easy to buy and sell content on multiple platforms. This isn’t another ad-generated model dependent on lots of traffic.

It has the potential to transform traditional media by removing the buracracy and power centers. Just like eBay you work directly with the customer and the market becomes very efficient.

Here’s what Richard said:

“Everyone on the internet right now benefits more from sharing information than from protecting it.”

And that is the essense of web 2.0.

This is a story that I want to write, about the formation of this company. There has to be a unique way to present it (perhaps on Yepic itself and at the same time on Business 2.0 with a pitch fitting for the story).

I’m proud to be one of the first 100 writers on the site and part of the (now private) beta. More thoughts to come…

Related posts:
PR Catapults Yepic’s Success
Yepic: Find and Sell Information

Can you transform a regular company into a web 2.0 company successfully? MyFamily.com is going to try. They are changing their name to The Generations Network. This encompasses all of their sites: MyFamily.com, Ancestry.com, etc.

The Generations Network doesn’t quite make me think of family history, searching for ancestors, connecting with relatives quite like MyFamily.com did. I worked there for a year or so several years ago. We had a normal company mentality. I’ll have to watch to see how this evolves. If they can pull it off it could be amazing. I can imagine the potential of a true web 2.0 experience for geneologists or for families.

I’m surprised my friend Brad broke this (at least the first I saw). Paul Allen must be busy today! This needs to be dugg. I don’t have time (I’m working on migrating my blog to my own domain and putting in social networking pieces to make this easier).

As Kelly of Startup Princess points out, this is a terrifc explanation of what RSS is.  They list RSS readers. I use Bloglines as my RSS reader because it’s easy and free. This post was written in straightforward, non-geek terms. It’s a new creative approach (explained how Oprah would explain it). If you’ve ever wondered or not understood RSS, start there.

They next need to write about what is a podcast and how to listen to them!

Last week I hosted a conference call with Laura Sturaitis of Business Wire. Laura is the Vice President of New Media Development.

She talked about with traditional PR there is a short-lived spike in attention. In the first 12 hours the Associated Press, Reuters, and newspapers pick up a story. It’s about breaking news, popularity, being recent and relevant. When a story is published there’s an initial spike in interest. After about 2 days the attention drops off. Traditional press releases take your story wide.

Web 2.0 kicks in later with listings on Google and Yahoo News, search engines, blogs, etc. It “keeps the story alive longer in more places,” she said. SEO press releases take your story long. It gives it a permanent home online. Another benefit is the ease of archiving. It’s easy to find in a search engine than to find back issues of newspapers or magazines.
Here are some highlights:

• Use multimedia assets with your press releases, such as: PDFs, podcasts, calls to action, images, video
• Get links to and from your press release
• Use keywords especially in the headline, which should be short and punchy
• Allow comments on press releases

I got an idea during the call of a blog press release system. It would have bloggers breaking news and allow bloggers to subscribe to SEO press releases about topics that interest them by RSS. Bloggers break stories. Newspapers often don’t cite the source. Making a press release distribution geared towards bloggers would help bloggers gain more legitimacy and exposure.

I hope all the geeks out there (and I mean this affectionately) in Utah are going to vote this November. Idealist, philosopher, eccentric, smart, technologically savvy Pete Ashdown is running against Orrin Hatch for a senate seat (link to Wired News article about Pete).

I wanted to write an article for Connect about his defeat (not that I want him to be defeated) and what politicians everywhere can learn from his campaign. We know if we were voting for the most technical of the two, Pete would win hands down. I’d love to see what he could do with those skills in office! He’d blog about his voting, send us email newsletters, you name it. I envision one key element of his term: transparency, something we could use a lot more of with politicians.

Flashback to my college days and meeting Orrin Hatch about Utah wilderness (now that’s scary)- the rudest politician I’ve ever met. I actually wrote a letter to the editor about it and sent it to the Washington Post. I don’t believe it was published, things like rude politicans probably aren’t news in Washington. I should’ve submitted it to the Salt Lake Tribune!

To reach future voters politicans are going to have to learn MySpace, blogs, rss, and more. Pete should be the politican’s consultant. If he weren’t a democrat in Utah, running against an extremely popular republican…let’s just say the chances are slim, but still.

Seriously I’m a big fan. He not only owns Xmission (who gives free wireless to downtown Salt Lake and I wish Orem) he blogs, has a wiki and drives an insane campaign bus. This rail thin politician spoke at the Utah bloggers conference. I was absolutely enthralled. You know me, prone to idol worship at times. I’m still game to write the article, if I can get a publication. I promise it will be a good read.