Web Social Architecture

Consulting Skills: Hiding

I left the world of independent consulting for the agency life because I wanted stability as my family prepared for our second baby. I thought: Enough feast and famine! Enough 12 hour days! Enough wondering where next month's dinner is going to come from.

Little did I know how crazy the agency life is, and little did I know how much fun it would be. It's both, and I don't think I'll ever give it up.

All consultants share one thing: Passion for the work. So avoiding loss of productivity (I'd call it smolder-out rather than burn-out) is a crucial skill. Your colleagues can reach you any time, anywhere. So can your clients. People want to know your opinion, and you'd better, by gawd, have one. You're only as good as your last meeting, your last launch, your last deliverable. Keep up. Stay sharp.

I do a few things that help. I work from home a couple days a week, and I'm careful about whom I tell how I can be reached. I put on my headphones at the office, sometimes with no music so I can concentrate on work without being interrupted, sometimes with music so I can concentrate without being interrupted by work. I start early and leave early or I start late and leave late. I hide.

On that note, I'll disappear through the new year with these last few words. No more posts, no more responses to comments, no email, no SMS, etc. Don't call me.

But if you're reading this because reading blogs over the holidays relaxes you, drop me a comment with more ideas about how to take time off, how to refresh your brain, how to stay sharp. I'm really curious!

Just don't expect a response from me before January 2nd. Enjoy your holidays, and for goodness' sake read, if you aren't already, The CHO at http://positivesharing.com/

Cheers!

FreeRice.com: Tiny App, Big Idea

As you might know, I am an English geek, who after a beer or two is apt to start unsolicitedly reciting poems--sometimes, worse yet, only parts of poems. I keep books of poems in my laptop bag to loan out on airplanes. I have a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary at my house, which I read for fun. And stranger still, I love and have always loved taking tests.

So FreeRice grabbed me right away. Like The ESP Game, which I blogged about a while ago, it's a game. There are a couple big differences, though. For one, FreeRice, unlike The ESP Game, isn't directly interactive.

The business model of FreeRice is really elegant. It's not trying to do too much: Users take a vocabulary quiz. Correct answers add to the user's score and to the size of the donation. Each question loads a new ad. The revenue from the ads funds the donation. Perfect!

The site claims two missions: Feed people who need food, and make English vocabulary available to everyone. Point one, yes. Point two, really? Spreading rice and vocabulary seems a little bit of a stretch to me. Can't it just be rice and fun? The experience is compelling enough as is, without needing to add a dubious notion of aiding the vocabulary-deprived masses. But no matter. The site works:

It works because it's simple, fun, and most of all because it's got an idea. It just makes sense.

And something FreeRice has made me think about is whether an experience that isn't interactive might nonetheless be basically social. The social context of the FreeRice game spans the online information space and the physical, concrete world--wherein there are hungry people.

Simple. Elegant. But most of all, helpful, practical, and doing good. A great example of a tiny app with a big idea.

By the way, anyone know what "ocellus" means? No cheating.

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Quality in Emergent Social Content

Users create tons of terrible content!

We must not say so. We'll say instead, users create content that ranges widely in terms of its degree of interest to other users.

I've been doing a ton of work on quality the past few weeks, in several different contexts. Consider the following challenges:

1. Our design for a client's corporate group blog includes a prominent list of "Most Popular" posts. In this context, where the blog is fully integrated with the main site via primary navigation, we expect many non-regular blog readers to wander over to the blog landing page, and we want to increase the likelihood that they'll see something both compelling and fresh.
2. Another client's technical support forums include thousands of posts, many of them addressing the same or similar issues, and only one of them providing the single best solution for a particular user's problem at a particular time. The most common handful of solutions address 90% of user's issues.
3. A client's social media site uses a set of algorithms based on user behavior to rank user-created content objects, and the best are exposed on the home page of the site. However, their exposure on the home page garners them more attention than average, strengthening their ranking and producing static "best" lists. The rich get richer.
4. A client's community site is wide-open, allowing posting on a range of subject areas. The home page of the site shows the most popular posts, but the popular posts have tended to be less than germane to the business rationale behind the site.

Let me take a step back, though, and talk a bit about the general approaches to organizing emergent user-generated content:

 

Emergent Content

Emergent content is content that shows up automatically, based on a set of rules. No single person decides what content is visible and what content isn't. Instead, content objects appear in various contexts based on attributes encoded in their metadata. Sometimes this means the good stuff shows up, sometimes it means stuff shows up based on similarity to other stuff, sometimes it means complentariness, and so on.

In the business, we call it "The Magic of the Web."

 

Algorithmic Approaches

In many contexts, especially on web sites with huge volumes of user-created content, quality is derived algorithmically, based on user behavior. And user behavior can be thought of as including explicit behavior like voting and rating and implicit behavior as well. For example, the number of people viewing a video object can reflect its quality--and beyond that, quality measures can include views of the entire video, comments on the video, time on page for the video, qualified page views, and more. And other measures can reflect negatively on the video's quality--incomplete views, time on page below a qualifying threshold, bounce rate, and more. 

Bits and pieces of behavioral metadata stick to content objects--less like fingerprints than like the folded corners, weakened binding, marginalia, and coffee stains on an often-loaned book--and provide a basis for us to construct the rules that govern how the objects behave.

Algorithmic approaches to measuring quality take into account a combination of these measures in ways appropriate to the type of object and culture of the site. Which measures are more important (and how much more important) depend on the context of user needs and business requirements--every site is unique. "Quality" is quantifiable only with the right formula.

The most bad-ass example of algorithmically-derived quality is, no doubt, the Explore category on Flickr. Based on its concept of "Interestingness," Flickr finds photos that are interesting and shows them in views filterable by date, camera, location, tag, and tag cluster.

What's so amazing about the Flickr Explore feature is that it's constantly refreshed and the photos are always, indeed, interesting. Flickr has an advantage: Millions of content objects. Naturally, the best hundred are pretty darn good.

 

Editorial Approaches

As appealing as is the idea the bottom-up, self-organizing content architecture, editorial participation has a key role to play in many branded online communities. First and foremost, an editorial presence can provide a human face for the company, a point of social contact between the community and the brand. An editorial presence can also model appropriate behavior, highlight the kind of contributions that best serve the needs of the community, and speak for the brand without being perceived as a constraining or intervening voice. It just has to be done with a delicate touch.

A while back I wrote about a quality problem on the social media site Treemo. Since I wrote that post, Treemo has rearchitected its home page, which used to highlight popular content, to feature editorially-selected content. The result is a much stronger affordance on the home page for content that aligns with the site's mission. Over time, that affordance will help improve the overall quality of content on the site--though Treemo's too-simplistic separate display of most viewed, favorited, and commented still render horrors upon the unsuspecting eye.

 

Hybrid Approaches

Combination approaches can offer the benefits of both algorithmic and editorial quality measures. Typically, an initial level of quality valuation emerges from user behavior, qualifying a top tier of content for editorial review.

A great example of the hybrid approach is JPGmag.com. JPG is a social media site, which announces a theme for a period of time and invites users to submit photos related to the theme. Users view photos one at a time and vote whether each photos is "good for (theme)." The experience is compelling, partly because the emergence of photos is affected by the votes of other users, so the photos that aren't voted up tend to disappear quickly. On the surface, the interaction is extremely simple. But there's some good, solid magic going on behind the scenes.

Photos that rise to the top based on user voting are qualified for review by the editorial panel, which selects photos for inclusion in the theme-based print edition of the magazine.

 

 

Beyond the Top-10 List

Ranking content objects based on quality makes possible some powerful uses of quality content--including but greatly improving on the typical idea of the "top 10" list. Quality can be superimposed on other metadata to produce content presentation that are both highly faceted and of high quality. For example, you can search Flickr for photos tagged "gorilla" within a geographic range limited to Rwanda, then sort the results by interestingness, and even filter by the type of camera you own. You can see the best photos of Rwanda's gorillas taken with your particular camera model, and see how your own adventure travel pictures measure up.

Amazon's customer reviews page is another great example. Customer-written product reviews are ranked based on a simple "usefulness" vote by users. Amazon highlights the most helpful reviews above and below a rating threshold. The most helpful favorable and unfavorable reviews appear side by side, an instant conversation that socializes the shopping experience, adds credibility to the buying process, and creates a unique value for online shoppers.

 

 

Quality in Action

All of the challenges I described earlier require a solution with some kind of quality measure. Over the past three or four years, I've found that my information architecture work is less about labeling and organizing content and more about creating mechanisms to apply descriptors and rules to govern emergence. As user-created content becomes more important, the IA work happens at a remove. It also feels more critical to get it right and to design flexible systems that can adapt to unpredictable user behavior.

Likewise, new possibilities to create value have emerged--and quality is just the beginning. Let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more posts on this topic.