twopointouch

Well, it isn’t. But we’ve stretched this handy little tool a bit further than it was ever supposed to go. Think about some of the most successful Web 2.0 businesses in the context of broken email and a connection starts to form.

Ed Yourdon visited eight Bay area Web 2.0 companies last week and drew together some of the recurring themes in a post yesterday. Top of the list was broken email:

Email is broken — not in the sense that Salon magazine and various blog posters … complained in 2003, when it appeared that we were being completely overwhelmed with spam, but in the sense that it doesn’t adequately support our day-to-day business and workflow needs. More on that tomorrow.

I’m not sure what Ed’s going to post on the subject, but the idea got me thinking, and he’s definitely on to something. In fact, I don’t think it’s just about work: some of our favourite social uses of email are irredeemably bust.

Here are six things that we try to do, but don’t work well enough on email:

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Douglas Fisher, who has helped set up the online community newspaper Hartsville Today over the last year, has published a 75-page guide (PDF File) to citizen journalism and running a community paper online.

It’s well worth a read. Perhaps of especial interest is what he says about training for these new journalists:

Other sites have done more extensive training, but we specifically made ours “training lite” based on earlier misgivings from interested people about doing “journalism.” Plus, we had concerns about where “citizen” ends and “journalist” begins when the training becomes more extensive (we also felt our turnout would be very light if we went beyond a half-day).

[...]

Keep it simple, short, focused and effective. Do not expect to turn your contributors into journalists; just help them learn to use your site so that they do not feel intimidated.

It’s interesting that despite pitched battles between the champions of citizen journalism and old guard media elitists, the actual practitioners of citizen journalism here felt that they were more citizen than journalist. There’s no judgement in that about the readability and relevance of the publication, it’s just that the people involved didn’t feel that they’d automatically become journalists despite their power to publish.

There’s lots of other very interesting information and advice in the guide, from the costs of setting up to the attractions and perils of hiring professionals to help to seed the content.

As I guess we all know now, the online world Second Life has a very real-world co-existence. Hundreds of people have been able to give up their day job to start shops and services in virtual stores, trading self-made artefacts and properties for real world cash, though the medium of Linden Dollars. More than 3100 residents were earning a net profit of US$20,000pa by May 2006. PR man Steve Rubel has the scoop on one of the latest and most interesting business projects to emerge in the alter-universe:

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