The JP Allen Blog

My paper on how Web 2.0 sites deal with ‘bad’ behavior will be the lead article in the Spring 2010 issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.  (Fear not, accreditation freaks!  Despite the ‘magazine’ name, it’s a peer-reviewed article.)

The editors gave it a new title:  “Knowledge-Sharing Successes in Web 2.0 Communities”.  The updated title better reflects my argument that the field of ‘Knowledge Management’ can, and should, learn from Web 2.0 communities how to get people to share more knowledge.

So put away those knowledge lifecycle diagrams and action plans, and start copying shamelessly from the masters at Craigslist, Wikipedia, Yelp, PlentyOfFish, Digg, and, heaven forbid, Facebook.

In our review of 10 leading Web 2.0 sites (Craigslist, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, PlentyOfFish, Prosper, TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Yelp), we found the most commonly reported challenge they faced was coping with deceptive and destructive user behavior.

How do Web 2.0 sites deal with ‘bad’ behavior from the very users that make their sites possible?  We divided their strategies into two buckets:  content moderation, and alternative strategies.  Content moderation strategies come in different flavors, varying from site-driven, where sites perform their own moderation and policy enforcement (think Yelp or Facebook), to community-driven (with Wikipedia as the classic example).  In between is a community-assisted model, where community members help flag inappropriate content (as seen on Craigslist and PlentyOfFish).

What are the alternatives to content moderation?  One of the most fascinating is the secret algorithm strategy, where an automatic but secretive method is used to promote the most suitable content.  Google PageRank is the granddaddy of secret algorithms, but the secret sauce at the heart of sites like Digg, Yelp, and TripAdvisor has attracted juicy controversy.  The flip side of dark secrets at the heart of Web 2.0 is a total transparency strategy, as used by the open source WordPress to deal with security threats.  Prosper has used a strategy of adding additional outside data to their user-generated content to help lenders make better loan decisions.  Strategies can be combined too.

I’m so intrigued by the secret algorithm strategy that I was thinking of making it the topic of my next Web 2.0 paper.  In the meantime, this study is under review at IEEE Technology & Society.  Details and paper to be posted later.

Slides from my talk on “Web 2.0, Open Source, and the Mass Production of Knowledge:  Why Collective Platforms Might Hold the Key to Understanding a Knowledge-Based Economy” are now available.

Thanks to the USF Faculty Development Committee for supporting my research this summer.

Fresh from the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 08), slides from my talk on “How Web 2.0 Communities Solve the Knowledge Sharing Problem.”  (Thanks to Andrew Clement for checking during the talk and seeing the slides weren’t there as promised!  Caught again.)

The main addition to the original paper are thoughts about where we might apply knowledge sharing techniques from Web 2.0 communities.  First, by bringing these knowledge sharing tools and practices into businesses as they are organized today (Enterprise 2.0).  Second, and more profoundly, by helping to create a ‘business commons’ that shares practices and knowledge normally kept (and constantly reinvented) within specific organizations.

The only other addition is data on how the web itself has changed.  Web pages are no longer just hypertext, but serve more as an interface to other resources (on average, there are 50 links to outside objects per page) and an environment for running programs (on average, 7 scripts per page, plus code on the server side).  Web 2.0 is not just a business concept—it is also grounded in changes to the web itself.