Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen

New business models for the massesby LOTONtech

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December 16, 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 and ebooks using web sites like Lulu and CreateSpace; we can mashup web content from web sites, blogs, and other sources using tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Dapper. We can write our own blogs, and 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, and will have, on traditional business models.

I Also Recommend: Introduction to Microsoft Popfly, No Programming Required, Working with Yahoo! Pipes, No Programming Required, Creating Google Mashups With The Google Mashup Editor, Mashup Case Studies With Yahoo! Pipes, Mashups Made Easy with Dapper, the Data Mapper.

Recommended business analysis of Web 2.0 principlesby Anonymous

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August 10, 2008: This is a great book that puts Web 2.0 in business terms. Normally, I read books that deal in gory technical details?not books that speak in business terms. But given that caveat, I felt this did a really good job describing Web 2.0 concepts and illustrating how they can be monetized. The book illustrates the various points it makes through referring to sites that everyone now knows about: eBay, Amazon.com, Flikr, LinkedIn, Facebook, and of course Google. Each of these success stories show how some traditional business thinking was turned on its head in favor of this new Web 2.0 business model. Throughout the 6 chapters of the book, the author provides lots of market analysis, charts, and graphs. This information is combined with some interesting studies in sociology to create a read that is well-researched and informative. While not a casual read, I?d recommend this book to managers or executives interesting in learning about how Web 2.0 principles can be applied to their business.