O’Reilly’s letter also led Bezos to accompany him to Washington, D.C., in an effort to educate legislators about software patents. That meeting may have discouraged other companies from maliciously enforcing software patents.

Noren believes that such grassroots initiatives make developers more loyal to O’Reilly’s brand and therefore more inclined, for example, to pick up O’Reilly’s book on Java instead of a competitor’s.

"[In July] we had almost 1.8 million unique visitors. An unbelievable number of people come two to three times a week," says Noren, crediting the site’s activism for the traffic. "If you can get people coming two to three times a week, and consistently, you can bet that a lot of people are buying our books."

Not only do IT professionals buy O’Reilly’s books, but they also offer ideas for new ones. Two years ago, a few visitors to OReilly.com began asking for a book on Exim, an open-source-based agent similar to Sendmail that is responsible for routing and delivering e-mail. O’Reilly polled site visitors, asking them if they would be interested in a book on Exim. They said yes. Now the problem was, who was going to write it? Then Philip Hazel, the man who began building Exim in 1995, stepped forward, virtually-speaking, and Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent hit the shelves in July.

OReilly.com’s success is a result of the company finding a different way to approach community, one that differentiates the publisher from the countless websites offering chats and bulletin boards to serve software engineers.

"Online communities can get an issue on the table. The Internet allows broad communities of people to form and act in concert," says O’Reilly.

The Trouble with Chat: K2

Like O’Reilly, the folks at K2 get ideas for new products from people posting messages on their various websites’ bulletin boards (the company operates more than 10 different sites). The board on K2’s ski site (www.k2skis.com) has been hugely successful, in part because the company makes it easy for people to use. Unlike many sites, K2 doesn’t require a lengthy registration process.

The bulletin board on Web Business 50 winning site K2skis.com accumulates as many as 800 new postings a day during peak season. Its bicycle site, K2bikes.com, hums along with a few hundred postings per day during peak season. Managing such popular forums presents challenges, the most pressing of which is to what extent K2 should monitor content. The lessons the company has learned have made it a Web Business 50 winner.