I completed the first phase of designing del.icio.us WebCites yesterday. I think of it as a sort of information service. In that regard, there are a few questions to ask:
- Who's the audience?
- How does it make money or contribute to the business?
- How do I decide on next steps?
Let me give a brief treatment of each:
Who's the audience?
This really started as a personal project. I do a lot of web research and plain old bookmarks just don't hack it. As I grew my bookmark list, adding between 10 and 20 a day, I thought it might be nice to share. The list already was on del.icio.us. Del.icio.us provides RSS feeds, so it was an easy matter to create a blog using reBlog from eyebeam.
For a while, the audience was actually people who I wanted to share technical talk with as I built the new site, people who would think the technology used was neat. As I started to think of a blog audience, I began to think of the people whose sites I was writing about, and as a result the extended description del.icio.us allows became more elaborate.
So, I think in the end, I may be currently targeting people who are knowledgeable and getting them to note the resource and point to it. One of the things I think I will need to do is start trying to move this toward a less knowledgeable audience.
How does it make money or contribute to the business?
I think of it really as a way of putting links up on a number of weblogs pointing back to my commentary on them. It's meant to be a traffic builder more than a for-pay thing.
How do I decide the next steps?
It seems I ought to get some people reading and trying to use this. Do things work as I would hope? Already I'm finding the answer is not always yes. How would the feed work? Right now, it just seems that the feed is a pointer to other people's sites with my commentary. Is that clear?
It also seems I need to build the rest of The Community Engine site so that people who wander into del.icio.us web sites will find the rest. A lot of work.
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