Amazon: canonical community by Ron Lichty

Message boards to enhance support sites. Blogs to communicate with customers. Wikis to generate shared documents. Chat sessions where your company's notables can answer questions live. RSS to keep track of what other thought leaders -- and your competition -- is thinking.

But what's Amazon? (It's certainly a canonical example of one form of community and collaboration functionality!)

Isn't every Amazon product listing really a blog? Amazon puts up the product information (including print reviews) about a book or other product -- everything it knows and wants to share.

And then it invites comments. Which on Amazon are called "customer reviews".

Which is more or less a blog, yes?