Customer Reviews
New business models for the masses - By: LOTONtech, 16 Dec 2008 
This book is about the new business models afforded by Web 2.0 technologies.
No longer do big companies publish products (like books, movies, software, songs) for us merely to consume. Now we can all be publishers of digital content. We can pubish books & ebooks using web sites like Lulu & CreateSpace; we can mashup web content from web sites, blogs, & other sources using tools like Yahoo! Pipes & Dapper. We can write our own blogs, & share our photos. Best of all, we can do all this for free!
Of course, big business stills wants to make money. And we as individual producers deserve to be paid for our content too -- if it's good enough. So the challenge is: how do we make it pay? Through advertising? Through subscriptions?
I'm painting a picture here of what this book is about. Not the Web 2.0 technologies per se, but the effect that these technologies have had, & will have, on traditional business models.
Tony Loton, author --
Working with Yahoo! Pipes, No Programming Required
Mashups Made Easy with Dapper, the Data Mapper
a good read... - By: L. J. Harris, 11 Aug 2008 
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, by Amy Shuen
This timely book contains a number of interesting contemporary case studies of such luminaries as Flickr, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, LinkedIn & Google. These examples illustrate how Web 2.0 permits the early enthusiasm that exploded with the dotcom bubble to be finally realised, now that network effects are established, capital costs have reduced, high speed broadband access dominates, user engagement is welcomed & the `long tail' has been made accessible.
The explanations of Web 2.0 principles are easy to follow, & each chapter includes a list of practical questions that proactive businesses should be addressing if they are considering whether to venture into what are still largely uncharted waters. For example, an excellent question that Amy Shuen poses to Marketing Managers is "can you identify the 1-3% `active uploaders'in your customer community & then engage them as evangelists for your business?" Clear warnings are also contained within the text for those businesses that fail to see the relevance of Web 2.0, or who regard it as a threat rather than an opportunity.
The real value of this book is providedin the end notes which highlight established books & articles about strategy that have `stood the test of time', & also where traditional academic frameworks have been usefully updated with Web 2.0 thinking. (For example, see the discussion of Michael Porter's SIX forces & Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation.) Pointers are also made towards new research that is now emerging from around the world that directly investigates the business implications of a Web 2.0 world.
Overall this is a well written & thought-provoking book, although a few more European examples would have been welcome :-)
