This weeks cover story in Newsweek is on Web 2.0 and lots of people share input.

While the content won’t be new to anyone who following Web 2.0, it’s great that the concept is getting introduced to the market. The article doesn’t mean that David’s grandmother will be able to use and get value from the services, but at least it’s introducing concepts and terms.

The following paragraph made the story worth the read:

But that’s not why Yahoo bought it for an estimated $35 million. “With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing,” says Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz.

For $35 million Yahoo bought access to a science experiment. They were able to look under the hood, study notebooks, listen to the retelling of stories, and even have a sandbox of a sort to help try to get a grasp of how to leverage the user generated content model across their current network.

Horowitz sums it up nicely, “If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something.”

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Around the Bay
• » Specialization Companies

• BROWSE / IN Startup Strategy
• « The Importance of Value Propositions to Commercializing Innovation
• » Specialization Companies