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Stupid Mobs Can Still Make Smart Decisions

Scott Karp updated his “audiences are not created equal” post with a thoughtful response to my suggestions. I’m not sure we really disagree, but I thought I’d expand on those ideas a bit more.

I think everyone agrees that the future of media lies somewhere between Media 1.0 and Media 2.0, and I’m not denying the existence of hierarchies. But I think Scott’s argument becomes muddled when he says that one audience is “smarter” or “better” than another. As he writes in his response to my post - smarter at what? He implies that the Digg audience is “less smart”, and I’m sure an IQ test would prove him right. But tabloids are also dumb, and yet they seem to sell pretty well. The key factor isn’t how smart you are, or even your knowledge of a topic (which I think he is using as a synonym for being “smart”) - it’s an understanding of what your audience wants.

Digg users know very little about the stories they vote for, but they do seem to pick stories that other Digg users will like. This is an affinity group, rather than a group with “knowledge” of any topic in particular. Yes, there’s often a correlation between being knowledgable about a topic and making good editorial choices, but not always. (And I define good editorial choices as “what your audience wants to read”, rather than “what your audience should be reading”. It’s descriptive, rather than prescriptive).

Helping affinity groups to find each other by building verticals (eg. Carspace) is certainly a good route, but what happens if my interests span multiple tribes? Instead of a one-size-fits-all “Memeorandum for widgets”, wouldn’t a widget enthusiast prefer a personalized memetracker that acknowledges both his love of widgets and his interest in foo? What’s more, the personalized memetracker could accommodate for the fact that he’s only interested in certain brands of widgets and certain colors of foo. This would lead to a much higher return on attention. Right now, personalization takes far too much effort on the part of the user, but by recognizing these affinity groups automatically (the Amazon-style recommendation engine), tribes could evolve on their own.

These are still half-formed thoughts, but I think the question I’m trying to ask is: instead of stating what the tribes should be from the outset (”building verticals”), could we let the tribes evolve on their own?

In truth, we probably need a bit of both - defining the tribe in some instances, and in other instances building tools that allow tribes to build themselves.


    Posted on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 6:33 am. Trackback from your own site.

Comments»

1. Publishing 2.0 » Audiences Are NOT Created Equal - February 26, 2006

[…] UPDATE #2 Pete Cashmore responded to my previous Update and took the thinking an interesting step forward: Digg users know very little about the stories they vote for, but they do seem to pick stories that other Digg users will like. This is an affinity group, rather than a group with “knowledge” of any topic in particular. Yes, there’s often a correlation between being knowledgable about a topic and making good editorial choices, but not always. (And I define good editorial choices as “what your audience wants to read”, rather than “what your audience should be reading”. It’s descriptive, rather than prescriptive). […]

2. Publishing 2.0 » What You NEED vs. What You WANT - February 26, 2006

[…] Should the goal of media be to give people what they WANT or what they NEED — or both? To get 100% what you want is pure echo chamber, like Fox News and many political blogs. To get a 100% of what you need may or may not involve too much “broccoli,” depending on how you live your life. (Thanks to Pete Cashmore getting me thinking about this.) […]


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