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October 16, 2003

Experts and novices

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Posted by Seb Paquet

I just stumbled across this interview with Joe Cothrel about social software and online communities. There's an interesting observation on how weblogs enable popular/recognized people to "be in public" without getting swamped by interaction with great numbers of interested individuals.
How do you manage the "significant few"? You reward them with recognition, or special privileges, or in some cases even money. [...] It's kind of a truism that the many want to talk to the few, but the few only want to talk among themselves. I think that's one thing that blogs manage very nicely, enabling interaction at a very high level among the few, without shutting out the ability of the many to read and even comment. Similarly, in the online community space we've seen an increase in online discussions which feature a panel of invited participants, and where other visitors to the site can read the discussion and submit questions which are presented to the panel by a moderator. I'm not arguing that these are superior to other ways of doing this; just that its useful for us to continue to create formats in which both the few and the many get what they need.
(Related: Ray Ozzie's The Rebirth of Public Discussion.)

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