Is this question on Quora.com yet?

Have you tried Quora.com yet?  It’s essentially an open question & answer board, divided out by topics.  The usual social media rules apply: you can follow threads, follow people, like answers, vote answers up and down, upload your profile, etc.  It’s also growing very quickly, going from zero to thousands of users and tens of thousands of questions in just under a year.  For me, the fascinating part is the meta-sociology that is still developing.  Quora is the proto-wikipedia, where information is still raw, subjective, and disjointed.

Early on, the site was populated by the early adopters, who by their very nature were authorities in the areas on the site and probably more attuned to the social media scene.  They were insiders.  Questions tended to be straightforward inquiries as to why an Internet business was doing something or pricing was structured or how many servers are available, and the answer usually came from a VP at that business.

Now, however, the site is full of honest inquiries that are really requests for recommendations, as well as completely subjective chit-chat questions where a “real answer” would be impossible.  For example, just from today we see “Which is the Best song by The Cure?” and “Why should I see Tron?”  These questions have no answers, they’re the aimless chit-chat (and they don’t even qualify for hipster-idiotication status like “which is more environmentally friendly, disposable razors or electric razors?“).  None of these issues would be allowed over at Wikipedia.  And they would start a fight on any single-threaded blog or news discussion site like HuffPo or BoingBoing or Fark.  How long will that last?  Is it only a matter of time (and popularity) before Quora gets swamped with subjectiveness and drivel?  Or are there structural elements in place that will contain the slosh-over?

Here’s what I see that’s good so far:

1. Quora is severely limited down to a question with several answers that get voted up or down.  This may keep the crap and joke answers under control, but voting only works to a certain point.
2. Users can follow specific topics in their feed, so supposedly it may be self-editing where I don’t need to see questions about celebrity diets or snotty book reviews.
3. Quora prompts you to invite your friends from Facebook and twitter– which is more than likely your real set of peers and friends, so you’re less likely to act like a goof with your answers.

Here’s what I see that’s not so good so far:

1. Quora is severely limited down to a question with several answers.  There’s no real easy way to build up knowledge incrementally by adding into an existing text (like there was with Wikipedia before the reference zealots took over).  Yes, one can edit a previous answer, but the site is geared toward people merely tacking on another answer.  In the end, it answers the question, but it doesn’t build up a knowledge-base (yet).
2. Users can follow specific topics in their feed, but this limits down the user’s exposure to topics where he/she is likely already an expert.  This may increase the quality overall, but it also may encourage showing-off in front of your peers.
3. Quora prompts you to invite your friends from Facebook and twitter– which is more than likely your real set of peers and friends, so you’re much more likely to act like a goof with your answers.

I’ve answered questions.  I haven’t asked any yet.  I’ve seen astroturfing (companies asking straw-man questions), I’ve seen shameless self-promotion (people asking themselves questions), and I’ve seen some solid answers.  We’ll see how this one plays out.

Times was, I used to be able to spout off any random factiod I thought I knew, and the Internet took it as read truth.  The Wikipedia used to be great for this.  Now, my rants are pretty much limited to the blarg you’re reading right now– we’re probably all better off for it.  Most university professors scowl very deeply if a student references the Wikipedia in a footnote, which is fair, but not for the reasons most people think: Wikipedia is a bad reference source because it’s a derivative work, not because it may be inaccurate:  The student should be citing the original work, not someone’s summarized boilerplate.  Wikipedia has largely squashed the ‘inaccurate’ label through a zealous use and requirement of all statements must have footnotes.

But that raises a conundrum for many of us: where is truth?  Where is the expert?  Is the expert the one with the most experience?  Is the expert the one with the most money?  The most devotees?  Is truth simply the mob’s consensus?  Graduate school told me that truth is the logical sum of a tested thesis.  I spent 15 years being smug that I knew what that meant, only now to really see that when the Internet gave everyone a soapbox from which to preach, now social networks are giving everyone a Hyde’s Park corner complete with audiences.  Companies like bazaarvoice and pluck are setting up these cacophonies wherever possible (good for them).  These systems invariably include meta-rating systems to rate the reviews and the reviewers, in the hopes of crowdsourcing the good information from the bad.  In general, it usually works.  It is still, however, all based on a Kuhn-model of mob truth.

The NYT recently published an article on a new computer named “Watson” designed by IBM to play Jeopardy.  Another possible use they summized might be to find counter-factual statements to anyone’s gtiven declaration on the Internet.  In short: a bullshit detector.  I can imagine they will be able to monetize this thing into millions of dollars: every social network and review thread can now come with a robot that can read plain speech, offer immediate counter-responses to erroneous information, and perhaps even show us a numerical score for ‘trustability’ or ‘truthiness‘ (all the footnotes in that link– irony!). The downside here, of course, is that most reviews for most products will be reduced to little more than the barren subjectivism of American Bandstand: “It’s got a good beat, I can dance to it.”

There is still salvation for quality content in quality reviews: hard numerical data, solid logic, and qualitative feature polarization.  I’ll explain myself on those in some upcoming posts.

a) Blowing their own horn on twitter — not worth watching

b) Showing insights on the social interaction of the great online hive that has now come into being — these are what I’ll call  “Network Biologists”, and are worth your time.

The network biologist will spend his/her time researching the strange interactions between people, and the even stranger medium that is created as a result.  They are not sociologists, because it is more than the interactions of the humans; there are robots, scripts, and crude AI influencing the mix.  The environment itself is ever changing– and the actors change as a result– but the center of focus has shifted to the behaviour of the fish, not the mechanical workings of the reef: hence the term ‘biologist’.

The usability managers in ecommerce companies were an early manifestation.  Now, everyone in the online marketing department, merchandising, and even finance is trying to ascertain how the huge mass of people will react to the online environment.  This is different from standard “retail science” or “catalog management” because of the constant arms race in online functionality as well as the multiple-variable equation where customers will influence each other in real time, as well as try to get in on the deal with some sort of affiliate, coupon, or recommendation in exchange for a slice of the profits.

The best results so far have been to segment and clasify online users into their various behavioural patterns.  Oddly enough, people don’t mind surrendering them willingly.  The current spate of “what [blank] are you?” viruses circulating on facebook are a segmentation maker’s dream: people are happy to tell us exactly what drives their brightest fears and darkest hopes. The most successful websites out there have tapped into the hive behaviour that humans portray when given just the right mix of anonymity and self-aggrandizement: Google’s page rankings are a canopy of dominant players and ground-dwellers in their shadow; Amazon’s entire merchandising catalog for millions of products is an expansion of fecundity like salmon spawning; Facebook is basic tribalism that proves Dunbar’s number, De.licio.us is our own pollen-finding wiggle dance; twitter is a sea of iridescent jellyfish desperate for attention; there is a flavour of pr0n out there for every strange perversion you could imagine (and a few you don’t want to).

I would imagine that colleges will soon have some sort of degree in Network Biology: it will be a combination of sociology, crowd biology, and basic network mechanics, to show how it is all wired together.

The Fractal Method will take 3-5 core principles and apply them at all levels.  Just as a fractal equation takes 3-5 variables in some algorithm and applies them at any scale (kilometer or millimeter level), the Fractal Method for project method will take 3-5 core principals and apply them at large application development as well as small tasks.  This seems stupidly simple, but that’s one of my first suggestions for ‘Core Principles’: keep things stupidly simple.

To implement The Fractal Method, make sure of the following:

1. Get all the business people and developers in a room and tell them that we’re all going to follow the Fractal Method.
2. Explain that the method means that we’re all signing on to 5 core principles, and we’re going to decide them right now.
3. Make sure the Core Principles are short and simple enough to be memorized by EVERYONE
4. Play a game so that everyone begins to memorize them.
5. Go sing some Karaoke together, because everything will be great from now on

Anything beyond this, in my opinion, is hand-waving and/or bullshit project management fluff.  PMs make decent money, and for some reason it’s all too tempting for a PM to schmooze the bosses with fancy methods and drawings and charts to show that they’re worth all that money, when I would much rather pay them to actually get shit done.

With that, here are my Core Principles (if we were to deploy the Fractal Method):

1. Keep things stupidly simple. Call bullshit on complex proposals and passive-voice responses
2. Write everything down in a common area. Wikis are nice.  So are white boards in the hallway
3. Divide by 3. Divide each task into 3 subtasks until each item is less than 1 day’s worth of work
4. 20 Minutes. Meetings are never longer than 20 minutes.  If you didn’t decide everything, that’s okay, because you can meet again later, but 20 minutes was enough to give people things to do between now and the next meeting.
5. Results win. Results are worth more than estimations or plans

There ya go.  I think I’ll start writing a book.

Thanks again to my friend Matt, we now have a consistent basis to rank mediawiki sites on www.wikindex.com. The score is essentially a combined log(10) of the daily updates, number of articles, and user count. The philosophy guiding the score is that a successful wiki is really reflective of an active community, and would need a fair population of users, a critical mass of articles for a base reference, and maintenance/currency from daily updates.

If you have a wiki, please consider adding it to the wikindex. We will continue to work on gathering stats from the dekiwiki crowd and hope to add those rankings in as well. We are open to any suggestions for improvement. One that occurs to me: remove the google ads– maybe not worth it?

Some odd things to note from the rankings: World of Warcraft fanboys write a lot, but not as much as the Star Wars geeks (Triumph could have told you that). Both beat Star Trek. Superman and Batman are bigger than Final Fantasy (as it should be) but smaller that Yu-Gi-Oh (Wha-t3h-fu?). Just outside the top 50, however, is a wiki about furries (*blech**shudder* no link on purpose) and it’s bigger than the Conservapedia: a wiki for right-wing nutters.

PRO:

• article ownership should connote some sort of expertise
• revenue sharing for the author may entice decent writing

CON

• article ownership will likely discourage collaboration– no one really knows everything, and even then, it’s questionable
• revenue sharing for the author will encourage plagiarism, debasement (for traffic), and squabbling

Boil this down, and essentially Google is telling everyone they can be their own Professor. That’s the problem though– “smart” and “learned” is really a peer-review thing. You get your PhD from other PhD smarties, not from popularity contests. Even then, the people who really know something are already publishing their knowledge out there and trying to get paid for it (they’re called “textbooks”). For those who don’t want to go to physical books, there’s this thing called ‘t3h Internet’. Meh. I really cannot see this past Google trying to coopt more data for their database, and handing out a sliver of the cash.

UPDATE: I am looking at that picture of The Professor, and– is that a whiskey still?!?

UPDATE2: Huh.  I think this was just a commercial cover attempt for something that Google was building for the Pickle Factory and their Maryland Cousins.

The obvious drive here is for attention, for the narcissistic joy of ego-googling your own name into that top position (over my rivals Dave Jenkins the photographer, the construction company owner, and the guitarist for Pablo Cruise, not to mention the mayor of Salt Lake City back in the 40s and my cousin Dave Jenkins in London). But is there a place for the meta-meta-blog? Would a site that gathers all of these together for someone and allow common updates work? here’s what I see as the base requirements:

1. The code must be neutral and open, allowing all these other meta-blog sites to adjust into the API
2. The site would need to provide a one-click-heres-all-your-links functionality
3. People would want an interface where they could ‘go dark’ with a simple click– erase all their profiles

This last one is the most powerful. Already way too many of us have shared way too much information out there. How nice would it be to be able to comprehensively kill all those profiles out there? The problem is that– with Google Cache, the wayback machine, and others– data never really disappears. So, this meta-meta-blog-eraser would need to go in and jam all these profiles with random information, in the hopes that as the spiders come through again, the newly randomized junk would show up instead. But we all know that won’t work either.

Yeap– Matt has done a phenomenal job on the spider for wikindex.com, and we now have over 9,600 wikis in the dekiwiki format, as well as expanded out the Mediawiki listings to over 3,000! Overall, traffic is increasing, especially after a big push from the stumbleupon.com link. I continue to be amazed at the number of wikis out there centered on pop-culture. I have recently found a wiki portal that is specifically aimed at (and sponsored by, I suspect) the drivel being spewed by the babysitter.

On a lighter note– who knew that the wiki for Star Trek is bigger than the wikipedia in over half of the European languages? Those trekkers are nothing if not well-versed.

I can tell the editors at what is probably the smartest weekly available are getting antsy about this. Their recent feature article focuses on the 800-pound gorilla of mass participation: The Wikipedia itself.

A corporate blog does not make you web2.0, it just means that the suits are going to tolerate one of the better writers in the office spewing out random thoughts on– from what I can see from most corporate blogs, how cool it is to spew out random thoughts on a blog and get paid for it.

Community interactivity, real participatory involvement with the course of a site, requires much more. It requires a trick, a hook, a passion that brings people in, let’s them alter or enhance or goof over some digital property in the commons, and then get a pat on the head for their contribution. On one hand we have the wikipedia building the Encyclopedia Vulgaris Populi, on the other hand we have farkers building a library of photoshop cliches that are still funny after 6 years.

I am proud to say I have contributed to both. I am also proud to tell those clowns at project restripe that they had better come up with a better idea. I don’t get the feeling that The Economist tolerates lay-abouts very long.