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.

Robin Teigland at the Stockholm School of Economics and Anders Lundkvist were kind enough to organize a meeting of local social media experts at the offices of Springtime, a Swedish PR and communications firm.  I gave a short presentation on what I saw as the ‘conventional wisdom’ on Web 2.0 and social media back home in Calfornia, and asked if it was any different in Scandinavia.  It was difficult for me to get a word in–my favorite kind of group!

The reluctance of large corporations to embrace social media tools, because of security and control concerns, was a consistent theme.  One takeaway for me was the idea that, in some respects, not-for-profits, government, and small start-ups could take the lead because they can embrace the latest, most efficient tools (e.g., Skype, Google Wave) without being blocked by corporate IT.  What interesting times we live in, when openness is not an additional burden, but actually the most efficient and effective way to do things.

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.

Slides from my mini-lecture, 5 things you can do with your customers online, are here as promised.  Originally offered as part of our MBA orientation, with a new version for our undergraduate welcome event in April, 2009.

My advice for students starting with social media?  Try these simple tasks first:

• Set a google alert for a topic you care about (LISTENING)
• Comment on a corporate blog (CONVERSATION)
• Send a product evangelist email (EVANGELISM)
• Answer a question on an online forum (SELF-SUPPORT)
• Vote for a product idea online (CO-CREATION)

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.

Our paper on Web 2.0 and Social Informatics has now been published in issue #8 of the Journal of Social Informatics (JSI). JSI happens to be an online magazine published by the West University of Timisoara in Romania.

How’d it get there?

Simple: global ambition meets free global publishing. A university somewhere in the world decides to make a name for itself in a specialized niche they consider up-and-coming (in this case, Social Informatics). They start an online journal. They search the web for content. They find entry #17 on the J.P. Allen Blog, and the rest is history.

Another strategy for universities looking to make their mark on the world is to build a high-quality information portal. I fired up my google analytics yesterday and saw, for the first time, a visitor referred by a site called social-informatics.org. I clicked, and was surprised to find myself at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

The good ol’ U of L has put together a quality information source on Social Informatics that I had no idea existed. And I’m not just saying that because they link to my blog! The publishing houses and established universities might own the big name journals, but what’s to stop a university on the other side of the world from having the premiere web destination for an academic topic?

Thanks to a humble blog, and free analytics, Romanians now know that Web 2.0 este un obiect de studiu important pentru cercetarea sistemelor informationale. And Slovenians can find out how to get people to invest in emerging technologies.

The February issue of Communications of the ACM has our Alternate Reality Gaming article as the cover story.

ARGs are games that mix online and real-world play, where players (sometimes thousands of them) work together to solve challenges. The game’s story changes in response to what the players do. ARGs began as a kind of intense promotional tool for movies and videogames, but have diversified into ‘collective experiences’ for business, entertainment, and politics.

ARGs are hot (see the Wired article), but it’s difficult to explain exactly what they are, much less why they’re attractive or how to run one. The article (written with my main man Jeff Kim at U. of Washington, and Elan Lee of Fourth Wall Studios) describes the first two successful ARGs that defined this new type of gaming: the Beast ARG tied to the Spielberg movie AI, and the ilovebees ARG tied to the Halo 2 game release. Wikipedia and the ARG network are other good resources if you’d like to learn more about the games that don’t admit they’re games…

What really impresses me about the big Web 2.0 sites is how they use familiar metaphors in new ways. By starting from what we already know (such as profiles, groups, ratings, and ‘friends’), people naturally understand why it might be useful, fun, and easy to add their own online contributions. Kind of like how the blog metaphor liberated personal websites from the more difficult and foreign notion of the ‘home page’.

I’ve written a short exploratory paper on the contrast between the ‘abundance’ of knowledge sharing in Web 2.0 communities, and the ’scarcity’ of knowledge sharing that is predicted by much of the academic literature. The academic research, mostly done inside organizations, usually finds that people are really, really reluctant to share any knowledge online–what’s in it for me, they ask? So they see it as a ‘public goods’ problem. According to this thinking, there’s no reason to share valuable knowledge when you can ‘free-ride’ off the contributions of others. People have to be rewarded, or else they won’t share.

Web 2.0 communities don’t have that problem–people share, a lot! So it’s time to change the knowledge sharing problem from ‘how to bribe people’ to ‘how to turn all this peer-based sharing into useful knowledge’.

(As an aside, I think this is one reason why wikis are still challenging–there are plenty of empty wikis out there. Our ’shared document’ and ‘version control’ metaphors aren’t nearly as widespread, or as well-developed, as simple metaphors like comments or ratings.)

A version of this paper will be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS-08) in June.

My new book project has the provisional title The New Web: Knowledge Sharing as a Part of Everyday Life. The book is my attempt to explain what makes Web 2.0 sites successful, but more importantly what will make them significant for our culture and our economy.

My argument is that the best Web 2.0 sites have stumbled upon a set of capabilities that solve a big problem: how to share knowledge. Sharing knowledge is not something that businesses are good at, not something that governments are great at (see CIA), and, sadly, not even something that my beloved universities are great at, even though that’s supposed to be our raison d’être. The best Web 2.0 sites have made knowledge sharing so cheap, easy, and effective that it can be a part of everyday life. As time goes on, we will come to expect free access to the best available knowledge about anything. And that will change things in interesting ways.

My current five page outline (alpha release 1) is available here. As the project firms up over the next few months, I will be blogging various parts of the argument, case studies, and data that might be interesting on their own.

I am happy to take requests from potential collaborators, publishers, and agents. An extended 26-page outline is available on request.