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« Boundaryless IT Specialist | Main | Open Source or View the Source Code »
Debunking the Myths of Long Tail and so much more!
The whole wisdom of the crowd’s concept I buy into, but with one very important proviso; I personally believe you can only trust the result when it has been tested and refined by debate. Not quite sure who said this profound point but the best one liner on this says; ‘When everything else has been eliminated what remains must be the truth’.
And in this remark lies the basic reasoning for collaboration, or should I say new world community style interactivity that Web 2.0 permits rather than traditional forms of structured collaboration tools that are often found inside enterprises. If the right people can get together, and have the right discussion, around the available information, - please notice I did not say facts – then hopefully the best version of ‘the truth’ will emerge.
Actually it probably isn’t going to be about facts, because the challenge today is the web doesn’t actually help us separate fact from opinion. We have more, much more, to take onboard when considering any topic, reacting to an event, etc., but at the same time we have less certainty about the ‘quality’ of the information we have access to. To put it another way; if you want to check the quality of information available to you through the web try googling yourself. Do you reckon the information that you find is a true reflection of yourself? Probably the best you would own up to is that it represents a snap shot of yourself provided through what you decided to make public through your participation in different activities, but not what your deep seated personal convictions might be.
The one liner on googling yourself to determine the accuracy of the web comes from a website where there is a whole section devoted to ‘debunking popular statements’. On a page described as a linkfest of debunking you can find a whole series of links covering a lot of popular topics starting with the Long Tail. Now holding the views I do about lively debate and wider interaction to add value and ultimately help define the best version of the ‘truth’ you can imagine I thought that I was onto something good here.
Maybe I am, but a wider look around convincing me that the work to find the good stuff amongst some pretty wild stuff isn’t worth the effect of adding this to my regular reading. And there is my point. I am as guilty as anyone else in choosing what I read, and in newspaper circles they know this. They are well aware that we choose the paper that reflects our views, and will report in a way that we feel aligned to, unfortunately that also means we self-censure the actual inputs to our internal debate to create an opinion on the ‘truth’ as we see it.
It does make me wonder if in selecting sources and blogs I am really doing such a good job as I pride myself on, or if I need to accept being challenged, and made uncomfortable, a little more so I can at least grasp the other views that are in existence.
Posted by Andy Mulholland on February 4, 2008 in
Collaboration
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Comments
# on February 4, 2008 10:21 AM, hoberion said:
its sherlock holmes...
# on February 4, 2008 6:44 PM, Michael Wilde said:
Moreover, I haven't seen all of these Web 2.0 tools allow for collaboration on anything that is remotely productive from a business standpoing. Most of the collaboration is sharing bookmarks, or rating videos, or networking---which is good, and fun.
Maybe thats a "traditional business communication" problem. Entire business processes have to be changed to embrace some of these new technologies--just the concept of Wiki's, while great--are often hard to implement because people can't get their brains around working differently.
I work for a software company and from the ground up, we've had a very lateral-communication style, where collaboration is what we do on a daily basis. For us, we grew up on it. For big 'ole bricks-and-mortar, while its a long time coming.. I don't see it coming for a long time.
# on February 4, 2008 9:06 PM, Niraj J said:
The keyword is "Personalized Content Aggregator's"
Systems like Google news , Google page rank ,Last.fm OR pandora.com , stumbleupon , OR Amazon ranking system are things that you learn to trust and the result of which are tested and refined by debate(Voting and profile compatibility)
Technologies like the above make the wisdom of crowds effective and useful. Web2.0 is all about Data and harnessing it. "Harnessing" being the key world.
# on February 5, 2008 2:50 AM, andy mulholland said:
Hi Michael
personally i do believe that it is about working differently and you may have seen my other blogs on the idea that we are now 'mesh workers' if we choose to be and not the more constrained 'matrix workers' as we learnt to be from the PC network capabilities.
I suspect that you have the benefit in a startup of working with 'younger' people for whom this is natural and also with out the scale challenges. ie we have 80,000 people in Capgemini and there has to be some highly structured sides to the business too.
Hi Niraj
I guess that leads me to your comments, yup there is too much going on in a company of 80,000 and we need to find ways to harness the wisdom of the crowds and define who and what to use and trust better.
# on February 5, 2008 4:19 AM, Niraj J said:
Michael ,
A few tools in the Enterprise context.
1.http://www.imaginatik.com/webdoc_prod_overview
2. http://www.cogenz.com
3. http://www.pligg.com/
I have used these in an Enterprise Environment and with a long way to go in terms of company wide adoption , I can tell you they these concepts in the Enterprise internally are here to stay.
# on February 7, 2008 8:47 PM, Alexandra Larsson said:
Sometimes I hear arguments that we need to have some kind of quality marks on pieces of content. However, it is quite hard to set that value since it is always depending on the context where it is being judge or used in. It also depends on who did the "rating". And that is just where the possibilities of a truly integrated architecture lies.
Trust can be built around explore who have done what with the content. It is more or less the same as in the scientific community where the quality comes from explicitly stating from whom you have taken an existing argument. Add the personal info and the CV on top of that and you can used that to judge what the possible relevance of an edit, comment or rating is.
In the enterprise you will have several factors that matter when you judge whether the last edit to the document. Position in the company, past experiences and education will matter but also the relevance of your other comments or edits.
In the end I believe trust can only be built by making everything tracable and exposing that in a usable way, such as Amazon does.
# on February 7, 2008 11:46 PM, andy mulholland said:
HI Alexandra
Yes i fully support your argument - its a kind of personal version of wisdom of the crowds reduced to a circle of people that you trust or someone you know trusts.
Thats why to me the URLs that support the statement are so important for what they say about the person's interests, research, etc, just as in academic white papers.
I saw a really great example of this last week when in another document on the Capgemini web site i failed to correctly give the date of creation or credit for something to the right person. Within 48 hours we had corresponded and corrected the document for these facts. According to the person in all other respects this was a good document that they liked.
Why i like this was it shows how openness gets the right facts established rapidly.