Yesterday, the fate of Cambrian House was sealed. After raising over $7 million, the Canadian crowdsourcing firm shut its doors after an unsuccessful attempt at a new round of financing. So what gave? Was it a lack of focus or poor management? Or was the model doomed to fail in the first place?
Social media is extremely powerful and scalable. It leverages the crowds to spur rapid growth. However, the very mechanism that enables this growth is often exploited in a counterproductive manner via cheating and “gaming”.
The basis of social media revolves around user participation and crowdsourcing. The ultimate goal is to provide the best quality content via a combination of user-generated content (UGC) and a filtering process. In theory, the larger the user base, the more likely the best content gets highlighted.
Wikipedia has revolutionized the concept of user-generated content and brought wikis to the forefront of technology trends. It is the poster child of web 2.0. Even so, the site still gets bombarded with criticism on a daily basis. Some social media critics, most notably Andrew Keen, cite two major flaws centered around ownership.
As a consultant, I work on cool new projects all the time. This is the glamorous part of the job. Then of course, there is all the grunt work that goes on behind the scenes. This involves client relationship management and dealing with all the admin work. Ugghhh. Luckily, there are web-based apps to help deal with these painful processes.
The following are 5 web-based applications are essential to any web-centric consultant:
* The entire 37signals suite of products is impressive. Also be sure to check out Zoho’s line of web-based tools.
Obviously there are many others out there. Please be sure to add your favourites in the comments below.
Aidan Henry is an Internet strategy consultant, designer, and web entrepreneur.
aidanhenry (@) hotmail.com
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