Transforming Conversations to Knowledge
This problem of how to transition ephemeral, but timely, information found in forums, Q and A sessions, all the forum-like forms on the network from Usenet to Twitter is one that fascinates me. I've thought about this for a long time without really coming up with any good mechanism for capturing the knowledge and experience of the forum, the group, from scattered individual, unrefined forms, to coherent, refined forms maintained by the community. I think that the idea of automatically transitioning content created by an individual into community property is a great idea. It may meet with some resistance from individuals. But I think it is a good solution to this problem, since anyone can start a conversation that does not just spin out into the oblivion of old forum posts, but can become a seed that grows into a well maintained, coherent, concise source of information.
Where does my interest in this issue come from?
As soon as I got my first website up and running, I wanted an email discussion group. It wasn't long until I was using Smartlist to maintain my own email discussion list. The discussions provided a wealth of information that was otherwise lost or scattered among messages---high signal to noise. One of my tasks was to glean the best information from the list and edit it to create a concise summary of the conclusions drawn in the conversation, which went into a single web page.
While working as a tech support person about ten years ago, it was my practice to glean solutions from our customer forums and distill them into concise answers I could repeat to future customers who experienced the same problem.
I thought there must be some way to automate or smooth this process of collecting the knowledge contained in conversations into a concise article form. It would be necessary to create some kind of bridge from forum to wiki. I thought about this on and off over the years, and tried creating a few tools to help with the processing of forum threads into articles, but until I stumbled across this idea of automatic promotion from individual post to wiki page, I could not see a way to do this that people would actually use.
It really seems this would work well with the quick-slow rhythm of a bliki, to automatically promote "blog" posts to "wiki pages" according to some criteria. I'll have to think about this some more.
In any event, there is another mechanism for easily capturing knowledge from users. We are seeing entire sites developed around a question, like Facebook's "What are you doing now?" or Yammer's "What are you working on?" or Whrrl's "What are you doing and where are you doing it?" with a threaded discussion or map being the result, which is then shared with friends. Sites like del.icio.us use self-interest to capture knowledge from users without their realizing they are doing the sites work for them. For social bookmarking, by giving users the opportunity to store and organize their own bookmarks, they provide the material for communal organization (or discussion, etc. if you take it further).
Where does my interest in this issue come from?
As soon as I got my first website up and running, I wanted an email discussion group. It wasn't long until I was using Smartlist to maintain my own email discussion list. The discussions provided a wealth of information that was otherwise lost or scattered among messages---high signal to noise. One of my tasks was to glean the best information from the list and edit it to create a concise summary of the conclusions drawn in the conversation, which went into a single web page.
While working as a tech support person about ten years ago, it was my practice to glean solutions from our customer forums and distill them into concise answers I could repeat to future customers who experienced the same problem.
I thought there must be some way to automate or smooth this process of collecting the knowledge contained in conversations into a concise article form. It would be necessary to create some kind of bridge from forum to wiki. I thought about this on and off over the years, and tried creating a few tools to help with the processing of forum threads into articles, but until I stumbled across this idea of automatic promotion from individual post to wiki page, I could not see a way to do this that people would actually use.
It really seems this would work well with the quick-slow rhythm of a bliki, to automatically promote "blog" posts to "wiki pages" according to some criteria. I'll have to think about this some more.
In any event, there is another mechanism for easily capturing knowledge from users. We are seeing entire sites developed around a question, like Facebook's "What are you doing now?" or Yammer's "What are you working on?" or Whrrl's "What are you doing and where are you doing it?" with a threaded discussion or map being the result, which is then shared with friends. Sites like del.icio.us use self-interest to capture knowledge from users without their realizing they are doing the sites work for them. For social bookmarking, by giving users the opportunity to store and organize their own bookmarks, they provide the material for communal organization (or discussion, etc. if you take it further).
Labels: social web, web development, webtwopointoh
posted by Steve Knoblock at
7:47 PM
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