User-generated content focuses too little on the user

This post is a quick summary of my talk at the BSeC 2007 conference:

The main point I was hoping to convey to an audience professionally obsessed with buying and selling content, is focus more on the user, less on the content!

Most benefits of having a community that's willing to forgo American Idol for a moment and do your job come from having engaged users. User-generated content is old almost as soon as it's written - a trend that's only likely to accelerate. Moreover, the L.A. Times found out the hard way that users with no interest in your wellbeing may produce scads of content you'd rather do without.

On the other hand, if you nurture your users, pay attention to what they're doing, and build on that, you have a good chance of getting great user content almost as a happy surprise.

A second point is we have plenty of good metaphors to guide ourselves in this area. When I had to manage a cross-functional team (read: one that didn't have any real incentive to do what I said), I asked my mother for advice. She has a team of researchers who would fall on their swords for her. I was ready with pen and paper handy and all she told me was "Use common sense, and treat people with respect". Thanks Ma.

Point is, she was right not to try and give me "best practices" since I was working with a group of people (and people are varied and odd). I ended up leaning on things I already knew, and recalculating as I went.

In the case of building communities, we have plenty of good experience to lean on. I think of the example of a "moving party". My grad-school housemate introduced me to this. Basically, you invite a bunch of friends over after you've put most of your stuff in boxes. They pile your boxes into their cars and trucks and cart all your stuff to your new place. You repay their hard work with beers, food, and a party.

This metaphor works for me because 1) there's a clear leader with clear objectives (the person moving house), 2) you use the help of others, 3) they don't get overtly paid, 4) part of their motivation is in the communal nature of the activity - the party. You could organize such a get-together and focus primarily on the moving, but you're not likely to get much help if you forget the beer and ignore the party that has to happen in the new house. If you don't think you can pull off a moving party, you might consider hiring someone who can to run your community.

The final point I want to reiterate here is expertise can take the form of leadership. Building user reviews into ConsumerReports.org called for some thought about CR's role as expert. I won't discuss what CR decided here, because I haven't asked for permission. Let me just suggest that people are willing to take sensible direction. In our metaphor of the moving party, my friends didn't show up and move my stuff into some place of their choosing. Parameters were set and willing participants were put to work.

Whoo-freakin-hoo!

I just started blogging, and I'm tickled pink that the first comment ever comes from Dave Snowden, head of Cognitive Edge and all-around smart guy.

For an evolutionary psych geek like me, that's Christmas, New Years, Kwanzaa, etc. all at once. Thanks Dave, er, Mr. Snowden.

I can't brag too much though, since he was just giving me friendly advice on how to find wireless in Scottsdale, AZ. Still, it's a kick.

I still remember hearing Snowden in The Hague when he suggested that by keeping the degrees of separation in a group low, knowledge management will take care of itself. This turned me on in a big way to how distributed knowledge and responsibility can be really resilient and effective. That thinking comes up a lot for me in my job now as I try to wrangle the energy of online communities.

Religion

Richard Dawkins was on the radio yesterday talking about his book, the God Delusion (which I haven't read yet). He feels that belief in God probably arises as an artifact of evolutionarily adaptive traits like, say, believing what your parents tell you. Altricial young, particularly those born to variable environments, would do well to listen to their parents. So, if parents tell you to believe in God, you should. The problem here is that it doesn't explain why religion has caught on so much better than say, Republicanism.

I've been thinking about this since college, and it recently occurred to me that our propensity to believe in God may have a proximal, direct benefit.

In any social structure that tends toward game-theory mediated altruism (e.g. ours), it would be valuable to imagine how the rest of your community is going to react to your actions. If you're thinking of stealing from someone (or defaulting on a debt), it's a good idea to consider how that will be received by the rest of your social group. If what you do will be received poorly, that might be it for your support network.

If I'm right, God started life as an imagined observer who judges us against our group's moral standards. Consequently, God is a really valuable psychological mechanism. Really, God's only an artifact insofar as S/He seems to be a richly embroidered version of the necessary observer.

Now, I don't believe in God (I really don't care if God exists or not, since it won't affect how I act), but I still think widespread reference to our internal omniscient observers may be the only way to keep society running well. I'll explain using traffic jams.

A prisoner's dilemma occurs when two people can both do better by cooperating than if they try to screw each other but either one can do much better by shifting the loss mostly to the other person. Now if you're waiting at a light and it becomes clear that the light is broken, the group of drivers has two options: First, continue to try to follow rules and, where necessary, fall back on turn-taking and other conventions used for keeping social order. Second, everyone for him or herself. Now, it usually starts off with order and then some jackass or another starts cheating, jockeying for position and going around everyone who's waiting in line.

You'd be a chump to sit still and take that, so suddenly the whole thing devolves into an increasingly nasty snarl. So what's interesting to me here is that if the guy you're cutting off is someone you know, someone you're likely to see at work or in your neighborhood, for instance, you're not going to be so quick to cut them off. You might need their help later, after all.

In a large, anonymous culture, that moral incentive is absent. People may act morally, but usually because of some sense of right, or karma. So, I guess what I'm saying about the psychology that encourages us to believe in God is that it's particularly useful in the modern world. If we can just figure out how to decouple it from moral certainty and divine right, we'd be better off harnessing it than convincing people to ignore it.

Buying and Selling eContent

In some ways, I'm really glad I'm not (yet?) much of a blogger. I was away for three days in Arizona at a conference where I was miserably deprived of Internet access. Instead of fretting, I swam. Apart from ridiculously expensive wireless, the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ is lovely.

I was a panelist for the 2007 Buying and Selling eContent. On Monday I told the story of how ConsumerReports.org adopted user reviews. It was a whirlwind weekend, with a preposterous amount of time spent rethinking and rewriting my presentation. I got there and immediately realized I'd pitched it to the wrong level.

So, I stayed up late on Sunday and got up early on Monday to rewrite much of it. A lot of the changes were heavily informed by a chat Michael Cheveldave gave regarding Dave Snowden's outlook on storytelling, and a long chat I had with Jill O'Neill, who I really enjoyed meeting.

For my 15 minutes, I got up, shot some video from the podium (which at the time was probably the best received part of my speech),

and launched into a story about how ConsumerReports.org added user reviews. The other presenters, Jonathan Hoy from LexisNexis, Tom Cintorino of PennWell, and Jerome Bland-Sebrien of FT.com all gave insightful talks, and pretty much rocked. Particularly after getting one question from the audience (out of about a dozen), I was convinced I'd blown it.

However, people told me later that it went okay. I just hope the new pitch of the presentation was useful to the assembled VP's and CEO's. Shannon Holman, who I had some really interesting conversations with, said nice things in her blog. So, er, thanks Shannon.

Anyway, long story short, I'm glad I went, glad I got to speak, and glad to have met so many interesting people. It also made me think a lot about the leitmotif of the conference, which was whether or not content will be free to the end user in the future.

Whether it will be or not, the conversation reminded me of something I heard some time ago about consulting. The idea is that if you have a great idea as a consultant, the best thing you can do is give it away. You're not selling your content; you're selling your expertise. I think that in a world where you can find almost always find content for free, the content providers will have to charge for services. We're moving from a buying and selling econtent, to buying and selling services related to that content. If a company can organize, filter, connect, etc. the content I can get for free, I'm going to pay for their tools.

An example of the new service economy of econtent was presented by Jim McGinty of Cambridge Information Group. His company is extracting pictures, charts, graphs and such from academic articles and indexing those as well. That's a service, at least for the time being, and I think it's a big deal. I can probably pirate the articles, but I can't search them by charts, and I can't extract the charts. If I'm trying to do meta-analysis, I'll need data - graphed or otherwise - so this service is worth paying for.