Donna
November 5th, 2007, 06:54 PM
Derek Powazek's keynote address to kick off the online strand at the NCHC Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.
Derek Powazek (http://www.powazek.com) is a veteran of online communities, the creator of The Fray (http://www.fray.com) and JPG (http://www.jpgmag.com/), and a consultant who helps companies and organizations add community features to their web presences.
Sixty second recap of mainstream media: the audience that consumed things, then the computer enabled everybody to make stuff. Then media freaked out, and here we are!
What is this thing? "User-generated content," "VC2" (viewer created content), "radical collaboration," "commons-based peer production" ...
Authentic media! Taking away middlemen ... hearing directly from people. Stuff people make because it's fun -- now with a distribution model that allows it to spread free and far.
People-powered products:
Include community tools
Embrace the wisdom of crowds
Produce a physical object
The talent is out there! It's not about photos of pets, diaries, nerds and geeks and dorks ... that's what it was, so it was easy for traditional media to paint the whole place with that brush. We all know that's not true anymore. There are experts online now! Like ...
Kim Pedersen's backyard monorail ... he worked on monorails his whole life, now he moderates the wikipedia page on monorails (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monorail). Who better?!
Wikipedia and sites like it are putting power in the hands of those that deserve it. More brains find errors faster -- always better than fewer. 50% of edits are done by .7% of the users. The best are doing the most work. Statistical analysis of edits shows that the most character change-heavy edits were done by newbies -- not even logged in! They had a piece of information that was lacking on the page, they added it, a gift to the commons, and were on their way.
What is community? It's a specific word with very specific connotations depending on who you are -- defined by affiliation, interest, location ... so how can it happen on the Internet?! We can fight about that later. For our purposes: Community is about giving people a voice in an immediate and public way. They are opt-in -- we have to actively join. Community is grown, not built.
How do we grow community?
Give people [B]tools that they want.
Trust them to do good.
Reward good contributions.
Punish bad contributions.
Expect the unexpected. Example: Flickr's geotagging feature (http://flickr.com/groups/geotagging/) had the admins worried about "porn islands" -- but what actually happened is that people used their map dots to spell out dirty words!
Roles: Creators, Organizers, Consumers -- we build for one and three ... but there's this little known role for those who tag things, vote things up and down, add metadata, add value by creating structure. The most healthy online communities are the ones who have something to offer for all three roles. Is a virtual community site about making everybody into a creator? The reward is in having an audience -- in being read.
Design for selfishness: Participation does not come automatically. It comes from having some rewards attached ... some altruistic, some selfish -- think about the rewards as you design.
[B]Finding the good stuff: How do we get past the sludge?
Humans -- traditional editors (like newspaper publishers), non-traditional editors (distributed by technology on eBay, etc.), and moderators. Humans make a judgment.
Computers -- Text search at first, just getting everything with text -- then Google PageRank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) that sorts results by how many sites link to that site
Hybrid -- individual human judgment aided by technology!
Flickr Interestingness (http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/): how does the community find interesting photos out of the billions out there? Interestingness looks at all the metadata on a photo -- how many people are looking at it, are they my friends, are they trending up or down, how many comments, etc. -- and then assigns it a score.
Digg (http://digg.com/): community votes, computer uses algorithm that also takes into account a matrix of other information about the stories to push sites up and down a list
Best of both: use votes from community to push things into the attention of human editor
Wisdom of Crowds (http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706/): the best book you can buy about web design that's not about web design. People think they're acting individually, but their processes can be aggregated to come up with a better answer than any individual.
Diverse crowds work better than non-diverse ones.
Design for selfishness -- give people incentives to participate.
Threadless (http://threadless.com/): a t-shirt store with no designers, salesmen, models, advertising agency, etc. -- submit a design, get it rated, get it sold and get money and store credit, buyers take pictures of themselves wearing the shirts and upload them to the site -- made $26 million last year. How do they do it? Smart ideas, scaled up as the site became more successful, trust by their community, a community that traditional companies want to grab and attract and use. And the end result is a physical product that gets out in the real world!
[B]Cautionary tales: It doesn't always go great. E.g., Yahoo Games Wii site -- pulled in news stories, accumulated content ... also flickr photos tagged with wii, which they sucked without permission because they owned it. The community noticed, and started tagging photos with wii that weren't about the game! The community felt violated and they saw an opening to screw with the system. Legal rights don't matter in a community setting -- what matters is community collaboration. They didn't provide a way to opt out. In community settings where the work is going to move into different venues, you have to give people control over their work and you have to invite with full disclosure.
E.g., the GM Tahoe Apprentice campaign. As a promotion for the Tahoe, they asked people to make commercials for the truck, with a website where you pick stock photos and video and then add your own 30 characters of text. People added text like "MURDER YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY" or "The Earth is now your bitch." Mistakes: creating a general tool for a general audience although they had a specific audience in mind (Tahoe fans), putting users in a tiny box where they have only a little bit of creativity causing them to chafe at the restrictions. But ... the campaign was actually a success because 600,000 visitors came to the site in 3 weeks and more than half went on to Chevy.com, more than Yahoo or Google referrals combined. A follow-up campaign learned the lessons, and gave people more options and empowerment, and didn't suffer defacement.
Ever forward: If the medium is the message, the message of television (and academia?) has been "Sit down, shut up, and believe what we tell you." The internet's message, though, is "you have a voice." The issue is not about how to control it, but how to sculpt it into positive and unexpected outcomes.
Derek Powazek (http://www.powazek.com) is a veteran of online communities, the creator of The Fray (http://www.fray.com) and JPG (http://www.jpgmag.com/), and a consultant who helps companies and organizations add community features to their web presences.
Sixty second recap of mainstream media: the audience that consumed things, then the computer enabled everybody to make stuff. Then media freaked out, and here we are!
What is this thing? "User-generated content," "VC2" (viewer created content), "radical collaboration," "commons-based peer production" ...
Authentic media! Taking away middlemen ... hearing directly from people. Stuff people make because it's fun -- now with a distribution model that allows it to spread free and far.
People-powered products:
Include community tools
Embrace the wisdom of crowds
Produce a physical object
The talent is out there! It's not about photos of pets, diaries, nerds and geeks and dorks ... that's what it was, so it was easy for traditional media to paint the whole place with that brush. We all know that's not true anymore. There are experts online now! Like ...
Kim Pedersen's backyard monorail ... he worked on monorails his whole life, now he moderates the wikipedia page on monorails (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monorail). Who better?!
Wikipedia and sites like it are putting power in the hands of those that deserve it. More brains find errors faster -- always better than fewer. 50% of edits are done by .7% of the users. The best are doing the most work. Statistical analysis of edits shows that the most character change-heavy edits were done by newbies -- not even logged in! They had a piece of information that was lacking on the page, they added it, a gift to the commons, and were on their way.
What is community? It's a specific word with very specific connotations depending on who you are -- defined by affiliation, interest, location ... so how can it happen on the Internet?! We can fight about that later. For our purposes: Community is about giving people a voice in an immediate and public way. They are opt-in -- we have to actively join. Community is grown, not built.
How do we grow community?
Give people [B]tools that they want.
Trust them to do good.
Reward good contributions.
Punish bad contributions.
Expect the unexpected. Example: Flickr's geotagging feature (http://flickr.com/groups/geotagging/) had the admins worried about "porn islands" -- but what actually happened is that people used their map dots to spell out dirty words!
Roles: Creators, Organizers, Consumers -- we build for one and three ... but there's this little known role for those who tag things, vote things up and down, add metadata, add value by creating structure. The most healthy online communities are the ones who have something to offer for all three roles. Is a virtual community site about making everybody into a creator? The reward is in having an audience -- in being read.
Design for selfishness: Participation does not come automatically. It comes from having some rewards attached ... some altruistic, some selfish -- think about the rewards as you design.
[B]Finding the good stuff: How do we get past the sludge?
Humans -- traditional editors (like newspaper publishers), non-traditional editors (distributed by technology on eBay, etc.), and moderators. Humans make a judgment.
Computers -- Text search at first, just getting everything with text -- then Google PageRank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) that sorts results by how many sites link to that site
Hybrid -- individual human judgment aided by technology!
Flickr Interestingness (http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/): how does the community find interesting photos out of the billions out there? Interestingness looks at all the metadata on a photo -- how many people are looking at it, are they my friends, are they trending up or down, how many comments, etc. -- and then assigns it a score.
Digg (http://digg.com/): community votes, computer uses algorithm that also takes into account a matrix of other information about the stories to push sites up and down a list
Best of both: use votes from community to push things into the attention of human editor
Wisdom of Crowds (http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706/): the best book you can buy about web design that's not about web design. People think they're acting individually, but their processes can be aggregated to come up with a better answer than any individual.
Diverse crowds work better than non-diverse ones.
Design for selfishness -- give people incentives to participate.
Threadless (http://threadless.com/): a t-shirt store with no designers, salesmen, models, advertising agency, etc. -- submit a design, get it rated, get it sold and get money and store credit, buyers take pictures of themselves wearing the shirts and upload them to the site -- made $26 million last year. How do they do it? Smart ideas, scaled up as the site became more successful, trust by their community, a community that traditional companies want to grab and attract and use. And the end result is a physical product that gets out in the real world!
[B]Cautionary tales: It doesn't always go great. E.g., Yahoo Games Wii site -- pulled in news stories, accumulated content ... also flickr photos tagged with wii, which they sucked without permission because they owned it. The community noticed, and started tagging photos with wii that weren't about the game! The community felt violated and they saw an opening to screw with the system. Legal rights don't matter in a community setting -- what matters is community collaboration. They didn't provide a way to opt out. In community settings where the work is going to move into different venues, you have to give people control over their work and you have to invite with full disclosure.
E.g., the GM Tahoe Apprentice campaign. As a promotion for the Tahoe, they asked people to make commercials for the truck, with a website where you pick stock photos and video and then add your own 30 characters of text. People added text like "MURDER YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY" or "The Earth is now your bitch." Mistakes: creating a general tool for a general audience although they had a specific audience in mind (Tahoe fans), putting users in a tiny box where they have only a little bit of creativity causing them to chafe at the restrictions. But ... the campaign was actually a success because 600,000 visitors came to the site in 3 weeks and more than half went on to Chevy.com, more than Yahoo or Google referrals combined. A follow-up campaign learned the lessons, and gave people more options and empowerment, and didn't suffer defacement.
Ever forward: If the medium is the message, the message of television (and academia?) has been "Sit down, shut up, and believe what we tell you." The internet's message, though, is "you have a voice." The issue is not about how to control it, but how to sculpt it into positive and unexpected outcomes.