The Monday New York Times (9 August) had an article by Bob Tedeschi about how ecommerce sites are turning to "community" to make their sites "sticky." Tedeschi featured vegas.com and noted how its CEO has been adding content features to the already robust ecommerce offerings. Several other sites are mentioned as well.

It was amusing for me to read this "revelation" as we have been doing precisely this at our network of web sites since 1996. We have dozens of chat and discussion sites as well as original reporting. This carries over to our ecommerce offerings at Jupiterimages where we have 18 community sites for graphics professionals and are in the midst of building two new sites.

Tedeschi's article should be a wakeup call to many of the larger ecommerce players who do not understand the "community" angle. I will not name them, but many of the largest ecommerce consumer sites are remiss in this area.