Web 2.0 Best Practices

Suppose you have been contacted by someone with a great Web 2.0 idea and he wants you to join his startup.
You need to know whether he knows what he is talking about.
The following checklist may help you tell the clueful apart from clueless.
I hope people will be able to contribute advice concerning each item in the checklist as well as more items I missed.

1. Dealing with bad content:
   • Spam
   • Trolling
   • Off-topic user-contributed content
2. Vandalism (and in general, content backup/restore).
3. Legal:
   • Acceptable use guidelines
   • Copyright violations and other issues
4. Content ownership/lockdown policies – will a contributor be able to export his contributions into file/s in his own PC?
5. How will the network effect be overcome (if another Web 2.0 site already exists serving the same need, how to get people to use your Web site instead of the other site, if they already have stuff).
6. Business model (i.e. how to actually get people to pay for the stuff).
7. Scaling with demand (nowadays, thanks to cloud computing services availability, the required scaling is not that of servers but that of customer service personnel and maybe other critical resources).
8. Are there standards (such as XML schema) relevant to the kind of content to be served by the site?

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities. View all posts by Omer Zak