2nd
Communities
Fred Wilson writes a story about Mark Zuckerberg while he was still a student at Harvard. It goes like this:
At Davos, Mark told the story of an art class he took at Harvard. He was busy starting Facebook and didn’t have time to attend the class or study. The final exam was a week away and he was worried about flunking. So he went to the Internet and downloaded images of all the art that he knew would be on the exam (not sure how he knew that - Jeff leaves that part out). He puts them all up on a web page and adds blank boxes under each of them. Then he emails the web page to all of his classmates and tells them he just put up a study guide. The class responds by marking up the page, editing each other, and getting it perfect. Zuckerberg aces the exam, of course, but also the professor told him that the entire class had done much better than usual on the exam.
Brings out the power of communities collaborating on the web. The challenge, of course, always is to bring critical mass of users on the platform so that community is self sustaining.
The best way to do it is to focus on offline communities & groups (and not individuals), bring them online and have loads of patience.
