CNET sure has been busy fixing up its community sites lately. In addition to recent updates to Consumating, Webshots, and Chow, the launch of AllYouCanUpload and the acquisition of UrbanBaby, CNET relaunched popular Tech news and community site TechRepublic today.
A key addition to TechRepublic is the use of tags to categorize all content on the site, including user generated content found in the discussion forums. Users are also able to create a personal space on the site, bookmark friends, etc. It’s a sort of MySpace for tech geeks.
Most of these sites fall under Martin Green, GM of CNET’s Community Group, who’s been leading a hard charge to bring CNET’s various community sites up to new standards set by Flickr, del.icio.us and other successful “web 2.0″ sites. TechRepublic is led by CNET VP Stephen Howard-Sarin.
Hello Michael,
There is a typo for the URL for TechRepublic up in this post. It says http://www.techcrepublic.com, should be http://www.techrepublic.com
Mani
hey thanks.
Although oddly it goes to http://techrepublic.com.com
CNET used to be a daily visit back in 1996
CNET owns http://com.com and most of their properties runs off that server
One interesting takeaway is that CNet traditionally has not made big efforts at cross promoting or connecting their various properties and brands.
How well does this decentralized hodgepodge content media network work? Why don’t they make a portal page and offer up the features of their sites?
I don’t see a link to ANYTHING resembling myspace. I even typed in http://www.cnet.com and explored the main page… nadda…
To put it another way, “What the hell are you talking about?”
I’m feeling a bit of deja vu where CNET is concerned these days. All of these efforts combined with the fact that this Thursday they’re launching CNET TV (ZDTV or TechTV anyone?) makes me go hmmmm … As someone who worked at TechTV for several years, I always thought that the idea was a valid one, but between the unfortunate timing (launch in 1999) and the worst ever management team, that venture was doomed from the get-go. I, for one, would love to see CNET’s redesign and new efforts work.
Mike - thanks for the mentions.
For those thinking “why don’t they leverage/combine CNET.com and the other properties and why we don’t “portal’ them, or massively integrate cross promotions? ”
Our approach is to build sites *specifically* targeted to each audience and content. The best comparison to our strategy is that of the the cable model (MTV, BET, Nick, ESPN, Speed). Each brand focused on something specific as opposed to the portal like strategy pursued by the broadcasters (NBC, ABC, CBS).
On the cross promotion front, we will do a better job of cross promoting, but the last thing we want to is force everything into a lowest common denominator or pretend that hardcore gamers at GameSpot have the same needs as the food fanatics at CHOW.
Ryan: Mike was referring to http://www.techrepublic.com as the myspace for geeks.
ha ha ha.
Maybe they heard our Mexuar Corraleta application is being launched on October the 24th at Astricon in Dallas and realised their solution was last generation crap.
Check out these links for more info
http://www.mexuar.com/products_sdk.shtml
http://www.mexuar.com/products_connect.shtml#
http://deancollinsblog.blogspo.....speed.html
Also if you haven’t heard of Asterisk check out
http://www.Asterisk.org
http://www.astricon.net
or email me at cognation.net for more info.
Cheers,
Dean
How many members does TechRepublic have? Looks pretty small. The forums are absolutely horrible. Layout and organization is pretty poor.
Interesting, ITtoolbox (www.ittoolbox.com) has been doing this exact thing for eight years with tremendous sucess. Here’s a recent ClickZ article that highlights their newest professional netowrking feature that I think is what CNET is trying to accomplish:
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623578
Now if they could just get that stock price back up. The stock option backdating was a mess.
Folks, you don’t go to CNET.com to find out everything at CNET Networks. (Just like you don’t go to NBC.com to see everything at NBC Universal, or Time.com to see everything at Time Warner, or MTV.com to see… you get the idea.)
TechRepublic is targeted specifically at IT professionals. It bears little or no resemblence to CNET.com, which about everything in personal technology.
Oh, and AJ: IT Toolbox is about the same age as TechRepublic and a LOT less popular. Ditto for Experts Exchange. We’re all in the same basic business of attracting and serving IT pros. And I guess it’s no surprise that we see the same opportunities in bringing more Web 2.0 features to this user base. May the best site win!
Drama: TechRepublic has mover 4 million registered users.
I am a happy user of Upload.com. And nothing beats a new software launch than putting it on Download.com /Upload.com.
(Stephen Howard-Sarin ): 4 million “registered” users, sure. But, how many of those 4 million visit every day? As we all know, “registered” users means nothing. You may have someone in your database that registered in 1998, moved out of the IT field in 1999, and hasn’t been back to the site since then. A lot of sites have been doing the social networking thing for years, but it’s only now getting recognized as a valid direction. A lot of these sites still do it better without a Web 2.0 interface.