E-commerce 2.0 Re-visited

A little while back, when I was musing upon e-commerce 2.0, I mentioned Chinesepod.com. Now I've gone the whole hog, interviewing the enterprising Ken Carroll, its creator, for the Guardian. I'd also recommend taking a look at Japanesepod101.com, newly-revamped, which is another fine example of e-commerce 2.0, and directly inspired by Chinesepod.

DE-commerce, XXX-commerce

One of the nuggets that I gathered from reading the book Naked Conversations is that there are relatively few bloggers in Germany. So I was particularly pleased to find that one of these rare DE-bloggers had alighted, however transiently, on these very pages, and carried, magpie-like, a gewgaw back to its teutonic eyrie.

The site in question is called Exciting Commerce, with the slightly pleonastic subheading "The Exciting Future of E-commerce". It has a good, clean design (one that coincidentally seems to use the same link colour as the HorsePigCow site I mentioned yesterday).

The content is good, too, not least because it covers precisely the subject that I lament is so hard to observe: the marriage of Web 2.0 and e-commerce. The site begs to differ from me, though, suggesting that there is, in fact, plenty of this stuff around.

Whichever camp you fall into, it's a useful blog for keeping tabs on some of the latest e-commerce efforts from around the world (and not just in the US), even if you don't read German, since many of the quotations are in English, and you can always just click on the links to see where they take you.

My only problem is the site's preference for the umbrella term "social commerce" over e-commerce 2.0: for me, the former sounds perilously close to a Victorian euphemism.

E-commerce 2.0

It is striking how everybody is talking about Web 2.0, and yet nobody seems to mention e-commerce 2.0. In part, this is probably because few have managed to work out how to apply Web 2.0 technologies to e-commerce sites that are not directly based on selling those technologies (as most Web 2.0 start-ups are).

For a good example of what an e-commerce 2.0 site looks like, you could do worse than try Chinesepod.com (via Juliette White), a site that helps you learn Mandarin Chinese over the Net.

The Web 2.0-ness is evident in the name - though I do wish people would come up with a different word for what is, after all, just an mp3 file. It has a viral business model - make the audio files of the lessons freely available under a Creative Commons licence so that they can be passed on, and charge for extra features like transcripts and exercises. The site even has a wiki (which has some useful links).

But in many ways the most telling feature is the fact that as well as a standalone blog, the entire opening page is organised like one, with the lessons arranged in reverse chronological order, complete with some very healthy levels of comments. Moreover, the Chinesepod people (Chinese podpeople?) are very sensibly drawing on the suggestions of their users to improve and extend their service. Now that's what I call e-commerce 2.0.