This collaborative dictionary revels in its self referential glory and the silly way that three letter words can be strung together to create meaning sometimes and nonsense that seems like it has meaning other times. It’s my way of weaving together the word dorks in my life, so if you’re up for it check out the project and shoot me an email… my guess is you have my email address if you happen to be reading this blog

>> Learn more about the 3 letter word dictionary.

>> Check out the 3 letter word dictionary wiki itself (beta – only the “A” section is done)

(and yes, I’m still working with Bold Interactive even though I moved to Philly…)

Based on watching this I recognize that what I wrote about here: The Community Correspondent: a Guide to Creating Link Worthy Content Through Forum Participation is more about skimming off the top of a community rather than building community.

Further, because I’ve not created incentive for community building in this particular project I will have to continually work outside of the system to keep generating content myself. It’s hard work writing massive articles – it’s going the long way around to generate community-oriented content (but still a great place to start learning…).

The Threadless founders focused on having fun and building applications that they would want to use and that resonated with their friends.

This feels alien to me, as someone who’s always looked for ways to help others monetize their own projects, but it brings back a recurring dream of mine – the idea of creating hundreds of little seeds and spreading them to the winds just to see what happens. The idea of a concept a day for a year – concepts folded quickly and launched like paper airplanes.

When I interviewed Garrett Camp of Stumble Upon for SEJ (SU Defined and Marketing with SU) I found a similar approach – they built for their community first and STILL don’t give a big crap about monetization. They funded themselves for a good bit and paid bills through donations in the early stages.

If your site/business can motivate people to DONATE to you then you’re probably on the right track.

This video is 45 minutes long. I got a nice kick in the pants from it and I hope you do too.

Thanks to exploding-boy I learned how to turn of the obnoxious visual editor and embed this video directly for you – Turn Off WordPress 2.0 Visual Editor

I spotted this video on Karl Long’s TCritic.

Primarily by working closely with Adam Schultz – I’ve joined Bold Interactive as a partner. We have marketing clients for whom I’m writing GOOD seo content, reaching out to bloggers, crafting blog creation strategies and architecting the social media mechanics of an ecommerce site.

Yes. It’s a M-Fing BLAST.

I’m also monetizing my time and thinking by writing for Jason Dowdell’s MarketingShift and the Search Marketing Standard blog.

Oh, and there’s some very interesting conversations I’m having with Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal for future projects

I’ve got other stuff in the works, but nothing that’s grown solid by cash infusion

And of course I’d love to have a conversation about working with you on your projects

Marktd poster jeffsg pointed to this interesting model from 3 22 year old entrepreneurs who started a company called AmieStreet.

Their write-up in Business Week provides insight into their content and revenue producing model:

“Amie Street, an online music retail site for independent content, uses a unique rating system where all songs are available for free at first. Then, depending on how popular a song is within a market, it goes up in price.

The site tries to engage users by giving them a set number of recommendations and rewards them with a set amount of free music they can download when their recommendations do well. “We try to turn every user into a talent scout,” says Elliott Breece, co-founder. The Amie Street guys keep 30% of each sale, giving 70% back to the artists.”

So far they’ve sold 30,000 tracks to 6,000 users. I wonder if portions of YouTube could work under a similar model…