The real-time web vs the new edifices of information

I've been having a play with Quora - a kind of wikipedia meets Yahoo Answers with a real-time spin that's suddenly got very hot.

There's some good social stuff going on, lots of instant connections being made - sign up through twitter and facebook and hook up with your pals for a festival of Q&A!

You get to ask and answer questions - the crowd gets to raise the profile of some questions over others (surfacing them to other folk).
Unfortunately, like so many others it's gone down the lowest-common-denominator route with its voting mechanic. Rather than surfacing questions that are useful and interesting to me and my friends, it simply surfaces what is interesting to the greatest single number of people.

This risks creating peaks of high intensity around lowest common denominator subjects (and there's no plan for dealing with the wikipedia-style rows over right and wrong yet when these peaks emerge) while leaving barren deserts of low interest because the only mechanic for surfacing what's interesting to YOU is to select from broad interest categories OR make a specific search. - on your own.

In other words it's missing the trick of socialising the surfacing of what is interesting to you AND your peers (and let's be clear, Twitter's trends continue to make the same mistake).

Even without this Quora remains interesting. While Twitter may be very effective as a human search engine (ie a place I can ask questions of my peers) it's not good at organising the responses or making them available much beyond real time.

Quora seeks to create an aggregate of the best info and retaining it for future reference:

"One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: "Oh, great! That's going to have all the information I want about that." It's also a place where new stuff--that no one has written about yet--can get pulled onto the web."

The team at Quora think this is important because while the web is full of info, most of it is not in a format that makes it useful to most.

Which is why Quora makes an ideal acquisition target for Google. (You probably didn't hear that here first).

But it's also its achilles heel. The people best placed to put information in a way that is best formatted for you are people who know you - your friends, your peers. Indeed 'best formatted for you' is a fluid thing better enabled by the real time web than is potentially the case with the edifices of information Quora is creating.

The most valuable content of all is the information you need right now delivered to you in a way you can best make use of. 

I guess we'll soon discover which is best placed to deliver that: The real-time web or the new edifices of information.

Related articles

• Quora (philbaumann.com)
• 7 Top Tips for New Quora Users (jamescrawford.org.uk)
• The Quora Phenomenon - Peaking on Value & Authenticity (louisgray.com)
• People, Topics, Questions - Intersection of Interest Graph and Social Graph (dorai.wordpress.com)
• Quora, an iteration on web forums (victusspiritus.com)
• You Can Now Follow Quora Topics on Twitter (skepticgeek.com)
• Why Internet Marketers Should Be Using Quora (johnchow.com)
• The Complete Beginner's Guide to Quora, The Q&A Social Network (socialtimes.com)
• Try Looking At Quora For What It Is (webpronews.com)

Using + Social Media = Fail

I was at #Online09 (Online Publishing) at Olympia in London, to do a keynote in the Social Media Marketing theatre today.

I'm delighted to say (and perhaps its a sign of the times) that the room was packed - standing room only. They even stayed until the end :-)

I was kicking around what happens when you deconstruct the social media thang, into its social + media parts (I have blogged about this previously).

But I started from the perspective that the future is not digital.

When Gutenberg invented movable type (circa 1450) a new era was ushered in. Within 50 years there were 20 million books on the planet (to share among 450m people - I know there were 450m people at the time because I asked my friends on Twitter).

That's 20m in 50 years from a standing start (as described by Stephen Fry in his BBC show on Gutenberg). And that standing start included zero mass production techniques or technologies. Quite staggering.

And I wondered what the big prediction would have been in 1500 among the soothest sayers of the day. What next? More books?

Not likely is it.

Yet we keep banging on about a digital future.

1450 is also regarded as the beginning of the great age of exploration. The future was the renaissance, new forms of organisation (capitalism replacing feudalism) the destruction of the power of the old order (the Reformation across Europe). That's the effect of more books - it is what people did together with this new 'book' technology.

And right now, the future is not about new and better digital tools, or their prolifieration - it is about what we do together with them - the new self-organising future that dawns.

And that, and what businesses and organisations can do to benefit from all this, is what my keynote was about this morning.

Here's the slides - and, as always, your thoughts are welcome.

Using + Social Media = Fail

View more presentations from david cushman.

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