Comments on: SideWiki and Google's Community Dilemma

By: Gregory Kohs

Gregory Kohs — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:56:51 +0000

Readers may be interested in this discussion where Google admits they've deployed a "secret sauce" to suppress certain varieties of Sidewiki speech:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?tid=160d3f27a115959b&hl=en

By: sam

sam — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:35:52 +0000

Sidewiki is a waste of time, it allows anyone with a dinosaurs brain to put any comment on anything. So if you went to MOMA and thought that the picasso sucked, you could comment “Picasso paintings are a waste of time and MOMA sucks” now eveyrone who goes to the site would see the idiots comments. Not everyone’s review is useful, most reviews are worthless. This is my opinion.

By: Aaron Fulkerson

Aaron Fulkerson — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:46:15 +0000

Two things strike me about this:

1). There have been a dozen companies that have done this over the last 10 years and all of them were totally uninteresting. Why? Because the publisher of the site does not benefit and is not involved in facilitating the community. It is done independent of them and therefore is irrelevant. It always degenerates into people writing ABC Sucks!

2). It strengthens my belief in the value of a "moderated wiki" capability MindTouch has been delivering to media and for product documentation. Publishers like the Washington Post (www.whorunsgov.com) are able to safely crowd source contributions from their readers while maintaining editorial control. They are able to facilitate their community and nurture it meaningfully. The same is true for customers like Autodesk, which is using this capability for product documentation.

Oliver @ZdNEt wrote on this topic here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/?p=884

For information about how MindTouch does this and the benefits you can find more info here: http://bit.ly/17Wc2z (be sure to watch the short video and check out the screenshots to the right of that page).

By: jenkins

jenkins — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:37:14 +0000

Why not just tell the truth, John? This is a hokey, weird product that will never ever get used.

By: sikiş

sikiş — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:44:39 +0000

What works today is networked individualism, not community collectivism.

By: Norbert Mayer-Wittmann

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:31:05 +0000

I think the reason these other projects Google keeps trying to start end up with a “FAIL” rating is that people are not comfortable with Google spyware.

nmw

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:28:47 +0000

If Google isn't in the community business, then how do you account for Google Groups, Google Wave, YouTube, Knol, and other Google community?

By: Steve Tran

Steve Tran — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:52:45 +0000

Did you notice the browser in the demo video was FF? lol

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:09:32 +0000

Does anyone remember Third Voice, from around 1999? This Sidewiki sounds similar to what they tried to do.

By: olivier amprimo

olivier amprimo — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:07:59 +0000

John,

1) Sidewiki is a browser application so it might be useful to link it Google Chrome.

2) Communities are just hype and need a closer look. What works today is networked individualism, not community collectivism. Social Bookmarking is successful because it articulates individualism and collectivism via positive externalities.

3) 1+2 calls for a peer-to-peer interaction model, not a central interaction model as web 2.0 offers (and that organisations still don’t understand while it actually the most acceptable for them )