• Technology Review: Market Watch: Convergence Is King – On in a series of articles Tech Review has on "The Future of Media". Convergence marches on. A great summary quote from the article: "The key technical characteristic of what works is the ability to facilitate consumers' desire to read, watch, or listen to any content they want, anywhere, anytime."
• Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python – An educational diversion for the budding computer programmers in your family!

• Does social media really correlate with the bottom line? Color me skeptical – Larry Dignan at ZDNet does a good analysis of the recent report by the Altimeter Group & Wetpaint. My take: while having a sound social strategy does not in and of itself promise success, in today's market every successful business must have a sound social strategy.
• Seeking Semantics in Government « Shepherd’s Pi – Lewis Shepherd quickly disembowels yet another fluff article on the move to 2.0 (or 3.0?) technologies. He's spot on that the intelligence community is one of the leaders in the government pack on this.

I wanted to post this video for two reasons: 1) They used the nearly the same headline as I did (and who knows how many others have ;o); and 2) while my post is a dry review of the ways to generate revenue on the Web, Charlene Li and Sarah Lacy have a brief but interesting discussion about why monetizing social networks is different from search and other general Web advertising (the favored monetization model on the Web).  I especially liked Charlene’s comment that Twitter may be amassing a more valuable data set than Facebook because they capture what “people are paying attention to” right now.  Take five minutes to check it out:

• OUseful Info: Education 2.0 Business Models – Though it does not directly address "Education 2.0" business models, this page provides a nice summary of different resources on the monetization aspect of Web 2.0.
• Taking social networks abroad – Why MySpace and Facebook are failing in Japan – Great post on the importance of "society" in social networking from Serkan Toto at TechCrunch
• Enterprise cloud computing gathers steam | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com – Dion weighs in on the current state of cloud computing. A great summary article on the topic!
• Six Degrees of Wikipedia – An interesting page put together by Stephen Dolan does an analysis relationships between articles in of Wikipedia. Try out the "find shortest path" section – interesting. Google recently announced that there are actually an average of 6.6 degrees of separation between the billions of pages they index on the Web. It is indeed a small world (wide web).

• Poking Holes In The Long Tail Theory – An updated view of the Long Tail. No big news here – it has always been an "leverage the tail in addition to the head" not a "leverage the tail instead of the head" proposition.
• Dawn of the Un-book — Internet Time Blog – Jay Cross takes a look at the decline of book readership and proposes the "un-book" to consumerize authors work. Includes interesting statistics about book reading in the US

• Five Ways to Mark Up the Web – Nick Gonzalez from a while back reviews five website annotations tools. These (and others) can be very valuable for new social research approaches to learning. Students can mark up articles "together" as they read them.
• Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks – Michael Arrington does some very interesting number crunching to try to assess the real business (dollar) value of the major social networks.
• Multi-tasking, task-switching, and humans — or why I didn’t finish writing this post three hours ago – Dave Munger ponders a bit of research regarding the human tendency to task switch. As the millenials enter the workforce this behavior will greatly impact productivity and work behaviors. (personal note: multi-tasking kills! ;o)

• Disney.com Breaks New Ground Streaming Full-Length Movies Online for the First Time Ever – Distribution models for media continue to evolve: "The full-length films will then be available for free streaming on Disney.com (www.Disney.com/WonderfulWorld) for the week following the network presentation."
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic makes an interesting assessment of "What the Internet is doing to our brains".
• LearnHub Relaunches Its Social Learning Network – Jason Kincaid gives an update on LearnHub and other sites trying to leverage Web 2.0 social concepts for learning.

• Getting Down to the Business of Creativity — HBS Working Knowledge – "…if creativity is integral to business, and to entrepreneurship in particular, how exactly does it occur? Where does this unicorn-like creature come from, and what exotic conditions will help it thrive in captivity?"
• Study: Schools, businesses must adapt to ‘thumb generation’ – Now we are getting somewhere: "Classrooms need to adapt to serve students who are plugged in online as never before, and corporations will need to adjust to the 'thumb generation'…" Learning works differently now that just a few years ago.
• Why Traditional Advertising Formats Fail On The Web – Publishing 2.0 – This article is a very good exposition on why traditional advertising on the Web does not work. But I couldn't help thinking this is why traditional learning does not work on the Web either. Learning on the Web must be different to succeed.

These are my links for April 2nd through April 6th:

• MediaShift | PBS – A great resource regarding the revolution in digital media with detours into journalism and learning. From PBS and hosted by Mark Glaser
• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business – A thoughtful look into the future (?) of monetization in a Web based world. The implications for learning and performance are intriguing. If all information and services are "free" then the world is truly flat and only innovation will deliver advantage

Here is a simple illustration I put together for a client that displays the six primary monetization methods on the Web. Is is a simplification and expansion on a post from Dion Hinchcliffe from awhile back. The only real “Web 2.0″ advances in monetization lurk in the “back door” that was opened up using APIs. Recently, Larry Dignan reiterated a common refrain that APIs are the future of Web monetization based on very rough numbers of how much Amazon makes from its numerous Web Services (additional interesting point here). While the numbers are not yet firm they are the only new monetization method that has arisen with Web 2.0. The illustration shows the monetization methods from the traditional “front door” of a Website as well the new opportunities opened up by APIs (all presented simply enough for even the busiest executive):

And here is a very brief summary of the six methods:

Advertising: The Web site owner sells spots on the website (“inventory”) to advertisers. There are numerous models for this type of monetization. Some are fixed price, some are per displays (“impressions”), other are based on the visitor clicking or taking some other action from the add link. Example: AOL sells premium ad banner locations for up to $500K per day.

Subscriptions: The Web site owner only makes some or all of the content or functionality available to customers who create an account and use a credit card (or other means) to subscribe to use the content or services. Rhapsody.com charges users $10/month to be able to listen to millions of songs from thousand of artists anytime, anywhere (online – additional charge to download a song).

Retail: The Web site sells products or services directly to the site visitor. This is a single transaction as opposed to an ongoing subscription. Example: iTunes makes it money be selling individual songs for download.

Donations: The Web site allows people who find the site’s content or services useful to donate money to keep the service functional. Example: RadioParadise.com is a user-supported online radio station that generates all its revenue from listener donations.

Fees: This is a B2B charge where the Web site makes some or all of its content or services available to other businesses for a fixed fee. Example: Amazon.com opened many of its online merchant functionality to other companies and generated an additional $250M in revenue in 2005.

Commissions: This is a B2B charge where the Web site makes some or all of its content or services available to other businesses and collects a percentage of the other business’ resulting revenue. Example: Google AdSense allows everyone to put Google text ads on their website and get a percentage of the money Google makes from the advertising.

And that is a wrap of the original document. But…

Coming Soon: Web 2.0 Show Me The Money (Part 2) – wherein I revisit the illustration and update it based on recent developments and the great monetization summary article from Professor Michael Rappa. (I will try to get part two up in the next 30 days!). In the meantime, please leave comments especially if you can point out everything I missed!