[Air-l] Re: Company vs. Community

[Christian Nelson]

"D. Silver" wrote:

> Is it just me or does it appear to the rest of you that the folks at Amazon,
> Yahoo, and fill-in-the-blank.com have been reading Howard Rheingold?  For a
> number of dot.coms (and former dot.coms ... rip), there's a thin line
> between commerce and community:  Online communities are set up and nurtured
> as portals to e-commerce.

Actually, I think they're reading books like Rosen's _The anatomy of buzz_,
which argues that word-of-mouth marketing is the wave of the future in
marketing. Rosen indicates that setting up "communities" that are attached to
commercial sites is a great way to pursue word-of-mouth marketing.
--Christian Nelson