kidmercury

As I've discussed many times before, I'm in the business of creating niche communities for professional bloggers; I view it as the business model solution for professional bloggers, or independent publishers in general (i.e. writers, musicians, videographers, etc). Here is our first site.

1. Blogger publishes free content to earn trust.
2. Blogger has a content management system that facilitates community building. This is where I think niche social networks come in.
3. Blogger focuses on educational content. Educational content can then be leveraged to sell products and services, particularly complex ones that require "the sales touch." The sales touch is something that is completely missing from the online sales experience. It is a void I am very confident professional bloggers can fulfill.
4. Blogger uses virtual currencies, aka points, to reward behavior. These points can be used to purchase real products and services. This is at the heart of crowdsourcing, and how full blown virtual economies will be built.
5. The end goal is to use the community to filter for quality products and services within a given niche, and to then sell those products and services -- basically to reshape and intermediate a given market. The textbook for this strategy is the classic book by John Hagel and Marc Singer, Net Worth.

This is the path by which Internet platforms will disrupt corporations and the nation-state, as I blogged about a few years back.

In my opinion, it will take about three and a half years (i.e. by the end of 2012) before we start seeing more serious signs of this reality. But I'm confident it's coming.