Born on the Web

With the upward spiral of syndicated content in mind, I can't understand bloggers / news platforms who only publish a small abstract from their blogpost into their feed. The whole syndication story gets absurd when you only put the first 3 sentences of your blogpost into the feed. I understand you like people to see your nice site design and your google ads, but I believe the value of your content goes down if you only publish an abstract. Look at feedburner or other services and put the ads in your feed. Ok, half-bred feeds still notify me when you have posted something new, but what if you wrote something really cool that I want to save in my feed reader: impossible. The reason for you to provide a feed has to be the user. You want to make your content as available as possible for anyone, don't degrade your feed to a promotion tool for your site. It's much more than that. For your readers your feed is probably the most important part of your site. Users who like your design, will still choose to go to your site to read your content, but let the user decide how to interact with your content.

This is one thing I talked about in my presentation at Barcamp Brussels, I will put the complete presentation online. But the presentation itself isn't that clear without my explanation. Smetty recorded my talk so I'll make the presentation available when I can get hold of the podcast. Every theory I'll talk about on the blog, can later be found in my thesis paper. What do I mean with syndicated content? It's a pretty broad meaning, it is not only content in RSS or atom feeds. It can also be content you interacted with trough a web service / API. As Peter Bailey notes on his blog you can interact with online content on different ways. Consuming has always been possible on the net. But thanks to the syndication of online content it has become much easier to interact on different ways with your content:

• Creating: it has never been easier for the end-user to publish content to the web. You don't need technical skills to make content and publish it to the net. A few examples of very easy content publishing: Flickr Uploadr (just drag photos in a window and hit upload), google page creator, the very user friendly CMS wordpress ...
• Collating: A lot of tools made it easier to collate online content. Most feed readers give you the option to save a feed item. You can bring together relevant content for later use. But the simplest form of collating online content is simple bookmarks. Examples: My FeedDemon feed reader has the feature to drag feed items in saved categories. Every feed item that can be useful for my thesis I can collate in my thesis saved category. A lot of content platforms give you the possibility to add the link to del.ico.us, you can tag it collate it and order it the way you want.
• Commenting: A lot of blogs, news platforms give you the possibility to add comments directly to a article. Even if this isn't possible, you can simply use the quote the online content and make your own blogpost on it commenting on the article. Examples: the add comment box in a lot of blogs, news platforms, flickr, youtube, ... The ease to reblog a feed item to comment on it in a lot of feed readers. Easy to blog items on digg.com or flickr: a button "blog this".
• Collaborating: Easy to remix syndicated content. I can bring together my own blogpost with a used flickr photo. We group our flickr photos with a same theme in a flickr group. We link our del.icio.us bookmarks together with the del.icio.us network so we can share valuable information.

The essential part on interaction of content is: The better your content is syndicated the more possibilities you create for users to interact with your content. Syndicated content is easier to consume, collate, comment on, collaborate with, (re)create.. Syndicated content added to the web can potentially make every other piece of syndicated content more valuable (=in analogy with Tom Coates "future of web apps" statements) This is what I call the upward spiral of syndicated content: When you create online content and syndicate it. It can become part of this upward spiral, the more people consume, collate, comment on, collaborate with your content, the more valuable it will become. If your content leads to new creations, those creations become part of your upward spiral and can be consumed, collated, commented on, ...

1. More interaction on your syndicated content means more value of the content.
2. The more it leads to new creations, comments, ... the wider the spiral becomes, the further the reach of your content.

Can you find more examples when syndicated content becomes more valuable? Or examples when it doesn't ?

The wisdom of crowds is something very very interesting. With the WEB 1.0 evolving to WEB2.0 it has became more realistic. It says that a random group of people, a crowd, can give more accurate results than individual experts. The intellectuel knowledge of the people in the crowd has to be very different. Diversity in opinion is needed to make the wisdom of crowds work. When I started thinking about wisdom of crowds a few months ago it also seemed very surrealistic to me, but it has already proven its use:

• A lot of companies use it to predict, how many times a product will be sold. They put a crowd together of very different people and let them all guess a number of how many products will be sold. At the end of the day they take the average of the number everyone said, and that will be the wisdom of the crowd. In a lot of cases it has been proven that the wisdom of crowds gives a valuable number.
• Google pagerank algorithm: One of the important factors that ranks a webpage is how many incoming links the webpage has. So the algorithm completely relies on the crowd, if a lot of people link that webpage with that keyword, it should be a relevant and useful webpage. It has already been proven that this method worked.
• Wikipedia: This online encyclope completely relies on its crowd, its member to check, double check, information. Users are very critical towards each other, which gives us quit good results.
• Syndication: I'm a huge believer that syndicated content can bring us better information. Because you "the end-user" can remix the different opinions of a crowd and put them next to each other

There are however a few requirements, but as you'll see, a lot of those requirements can be complied in a web 2.0 environment:

• Diversity: Diversity, or large variation in ideas, is crucial to being able to extract wisdom from the crowd. We need liberal, conservative, crazy, hair-brained, logical, rational, irrational, and all ideas in between. The reason why we need such diversity is probability. The more diversity in the ideas that we include, the higher the probability that one of those ideas is the *right* one. Because sometimes it just happens to be that one hair-brained idea that leads us down the right path. (source: bokardo.com)
• Independence: In addition to a diversity of ideas from which to choose, we need the quality of not imitating the first idea that comes along (even if it is diverse). Instead, we need to hold to our own ideas, if possible, to come up with our own conclusions. That’s not to say that we won’t agree with other people, but each of us has our own set of knowledge, and holding to that set of knowledge will keep our thought independent. Independence is about how we react to ideas as they are presented to us. (source: bokardo.com)
• Decentralization: Most of us tend to generalize ideas so as to make them applicable to other situations. This, however, might not be the best way to tackle problems in order to extract the wisdom of crowds. According to Surowieki, a better way might be to attack problems individually, in a decentralized manner, so that those people closest to the problem are the ones who solve it, not somebody from on high. Decentralization is crucial to tacit knowledge, that sort of knowledge that is hard to communicate to others, and is often vital to solving the problem at hand. (source: bokardo.com)

An aggregator that collects syndicated content from a diversity of people about a certain theme. This aggregator in combination with a community popular algorithm, that filters out the bad quality content, should bring us the wisdom of crowds about a certain theme at a certain moment in time. Why ? --> We get different views and ideas about the theme, because of the diversity in the group of people. Always a positive and negative aspect, always people pro and contra. --> The popular algorithm should bring forward the best, most popular, most controversial content. --> You stay an independent content provider. The platform aggregates the content, you keep writing on your personal blog or keep posting bookmarks to your personal del.icio.us account. The platform doesn't want to take that individual and independent power away. It is necessairy that the aggregated content stays independent. A community web aggregator that brings forward the wisdom of crowds about a certain theme at a certain moment in time. What do you think? Will you use it? Sources :

1. The book: the wisdom of crowds (If you want to borrow it, just ask)
2. The author's podcast at SXSW Conference
3. Wisdom of crowds is the crucial idea of the WEB 2.0
4. Shouldn't the wisdom of crowds lead to better politicians?