IDEAS: Platform for Community Collaboration

My Crazy Company Idea

What do you get when you combine Wiki, Blog, Podcasting and other OpenSource social media technologies into an integrated framework that can be configured and deployed in a hosted service?

You get my next generation business model idea. Major companies are looking at how to grow, engage and “control or guide” their community bases. This is not a new idea, but it is an idea whose time has come. Checkout ProductWiki, a product catalogue that is editable by the public.

This looks like an interesting move in several ways:

• It could sell more because each product listing can have vastly better levels of information.
• It provides shoppers greater depth of content that bypasses marketing spin.
• It provides checks and balances to what can be seriously flawed product reviews.
• It introduces the emerging concept of customer collaboration to a massive audience.

This got me thinking that any company or market segment could leverage this approach for their respective products and services. Even though Wikipedia has started this trend, they are too generalized to fully satistfy the depth of information that community demands. There is an opportunity to create specialized Open Community Forums that are targeted at areas of interest such as Music, Movies, Books, Electronics, Sports and any other topic with hot interest. My idea for a new company is to provide the hosted community engine service that enables this to blossom. Remember "communities.com", well this is the next generation of collective shared intelligence.

Who's in?