> although the idea of social economy did spark an idea, kinda ... something > I'd noticed on LJ and Secondlife is that people use social networks to > advertise their craft enterprises in a word-of-mouth sort of way. > > Is there a way we can offer users the opportunity to create 'shops' ? > Sort of a paid account with a user payment system, or an easy integration to > paypal if they have that, and a product search function [or maybe one could > just use tags] ?? > > I know it's not specifically a social network sort of thing, but it does > enhance the user experience by offering crafty type folk an easy way to buy > and sell their stuff [and the way the economy is going, we're going to be > seeing more people doing that]
We've discussed this before as something that we want to have. In particular, some of the ideas we've batted around include: * User-to-user buy/sell/whatever ads in a "Marketplace" type of environment, people can go and look for things. (Revenue for DW: costs to list an ad, or costs to list a graphical ad, or bold, or whatever.) * Pay-to-view-content for people who, for example, are writing a novella on the site and want to charge people $1 to view it. (Revenue for DW: we COULD take a cut off of this, but then we get into that social area, so we'd have to work this out.) * User-to-user advertising. Personally, I have nothing against ads that are actually relevant. If we could find a way for DW users to advertise to DW users (and allow a total opt-out of all advertising, regardless of account type, IMO) then we could have interesting/relevant ads. Anyway, emphasis here is on "things we've discussed" and not "things that are planned." DW is about being a community, and the only things that will get done on the site are things that are going to have a positive effect on the community. Which means lots of discussion, forethought, and planning before anything actually happens on the site. It also means that if the decision of the community is "we don't want this" then hey, it doesn't happen. But the flip side of that - and this is another topic drift - is that the DW community is entirely responsible for its livelihood. There are no third parties with cash going to be paying to keep this thing going. No advertisers, sponsors, investors, etc etc. Just DW users. We're all in this together. (And to reiterate what Denise said, I'm pretty darn confident that we will be sustainable. Which reminds me, I don't think we've yet published the LLC charter and our spreadsheets... and I owe Denise some numbers on hosting/bandwidth/etc... right.) -- Mark Smith / xb95 [email protected] _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
