Comments on: Business2.0 Misunderstands a Web 2.0 Failure

By: Heinz Welker

Heinz Welker — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:45:04 +0000

Flickr has to be open because I wouldn’t pay for the photos of some random person. But I’m willing to share mine quid pro quo.

By: David G

David G — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 05:30:13 +0000

I actually think it’s “none of the above”. The personal utility argument does not really apply to wiki adoption — or at least, it’s not the make-or-break issue it is on some other sites.

Wiki’s are a very unique form of interactivity that is not suited to authoring all types of content and for that simple reason, these initiatives failed. The art in designing for a web2 audience is to choose the interaction type that best suits the resulting user generated content. e.g. Blogs are for publishers and forums for folks with questions. Y! answers would have been a failure if it were implimented on a blogging platform.

It’s stupid to expect a crowd to collaborate on an opinion — or on (good) creative writing — or on a product review, which again is just a (creatively written) opinion. Those content types have no meaning in a group-think context. Opinion, by definition, is personal — it’s not and will never be collaborative (without becoming compromise). If you tried to edit my opinion, I’d be furious — what was the LA Times thinking (only the editor is qualified to write an editorial) — a wiki is the exact wrong technology to agregate user-generated editorial content.

A wiki actually has extremely limited scope in the type of content it’s useful for. Wiki’s are great when trying to compile either comprehensive or neutral content — which is why wikipedia works so well.

PS — this is not (just) my opinion, these lessons were learnt the hard way.

By: asg

asg — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:58:41 +0000

Well, in informal logic, “the exception that proves the rule” refers to an exception that is so narrowly constructed and tailored that, by implication, it is a rare and specialized case, and therefore the rule is valid. I would agree that the reference quoted in the original post is an abuse of the term, however.

An alternate sense of “exception that proves the rule” turns on a different sense of “prove” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule).

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:05:36 +0000

Well, depending on how you define “success,” there may or may not be lots of examples of closed content biz models. It seems to me that the WSJ is pretty successful, and they are closed content, but they also provide something valuable. That’s the key. Flickr has to be open because I wouldn’t pay for the photos of some random person. But I’m willing to share mine quid pro quo.

Media is all about telling people what they want to hear, and people want to hear that closed content biz models don’t work. I fault the eggheads as much as the journalists.