Brad Ideas - Serial vs. Browsed, Reader-Friendly vs. Writer-Friendly - Comments

Camilo Wilson — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:17:48 -0700

One of the The WELL's most loved features was its "All See New", which presented the reader with a digest of every post he had not read in the conferences marked as of interest to him.

CrazyGirl — Sat, 17 Jul 2004 16:11:35 -0700

Brad- excuse me for taking drastic measures to contact you- but where in the world is waldo? and your email address?? I would luv to chat with you- and I know you are probably a real busy guy- or at least pretending to be really busy, j/k. Please find it in your heart to email me- this is for completely unexplainable reasons- but trust me on this one, k?
and p.s. I would never ever use qwest!!

Paul — Sat, 17 Jul 2004 08:31:14 -0700

We want not only a serial presentation at times, but a distillation of the facts. As a friend of mine once taught me: we don't need to describe the linkages between this floor pedal and the engine - we want to know that if we push the gas pedal we'll go faster.

Otherwise a contextual search engine could be part of the solution.

jeff ubois — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 06:37:17 -0700

It seems like there is a tension between these systems as repositories of reference information and as live conversations, with living documents (e.g. FAQs) somewhere in between. You could also think of this as the time dimension, or the distinction between ephemeral and permanant materials.

Ideally, the tools make it easy to transform the best of the living conversations into reference material, and to improve the conversations with easy links back to relevant reference material.

It'd be interesting to list variables, e.g.:
- scale. How many people are in the discussion?
- purpose. What is binding the group discussion together? Share interest in a narrow topic? Common real world experience? A project of limited duration?
- relationship to other media (context). Discussion groups about television shows, IM sessions about what's happening in a con call, wikis supporting a class, etc. Collaboration tools don't have to stand alone.

Serial vs. Browsed, Reader-Friendly vs. Writer-Friendly

brad — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 03:54:28 -0700

Online discussion and collaboration tools are old now, dating back almost 40 years to PLATO, 30 years for mailing lists, 25 years for BBSs and USENET. Yet somehow I don't feel we've got it right yet, and in fact may be going in some wrong directions.

I beleive there are two central dichotomies that make the problem hard to solve. \

The first is the distinction between "serial" material which is meant to be read as a stream (though perhaps referenced later) and "browsable" information meant to be read in a somewhat more random order.

E-mail, USENET and message boards are largely serial. Blogs and web boards are attempts to be serial in a browsed medium, which the web largely is. Wikis are on the browseable side of the spectrum, though of course they contain serial aspects, like the ability to e-mail lists of recently changed pages.

The second dichotomy is between reader-friendly and writer-friendly. Writer-friendly systems put as few burdens on the writer as possible in order to encourage participation. Reader friendly systems try to make it as easy as possible for a reader to get what she's looking for out of the system. One of the central quests has been for automated software tools that let the writer not do much work but still let the reader get what they want. A search engine is an example of such a technology.

A professional publication will be highly reader-friendly. If you have a million readers, it's worth every possible effort on the writer or publisher's part to make it better for them, especially if they are your source of income. Writers will take the time to write well, organize, categorize and put in links to releated resources. They will create sidebars to deal with other topics or provide introductions to readers not as familiar with the subject matter.