The infrastructure to set up online communities is not all that complicated — the member base is the real asset. I’m not sure that MSM companies will know how to manage them, as the following article suggests.

Get out of MySpace, bloggers rage at Murdoch
Nicholas Wapshott, The Independent, 08 Jan 2006

Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (£355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.
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The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links. However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of “a simple misunderstanding”.

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Posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 4:16 pm in categories [Blogging, Web, GENERAL]. Comments feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site. edit