A friend of mine Dave Panos runs a great company called Pluck....Pluck is company that provides social interaction capabilities to large media properties... Pluck has one SAS(software as service) that allows people to comment after a story...... Seems simple right? A lot of times the best ideas are. The technology is more powerful than you might think as the intuitiveness of presentation and scalability of it is a little more tricky than it may seem....
So I am a big baseball fan... a tried and true Yankee Fan (since birth in upstate New York watching Catfish Hunter and Thurman Munson) and I've been anxiously following the Johan Santana trade talks... My personal opinion is don't trade for em, keep the young guys. What I've discovered through my obsession with this topic is that the "comments" after the newspaper article in the New York times was becoming much more informative than the article itself...The viewpoints, facts and details were so much more preferable than the article that I found myself going straight to the comments section...and boy did I find that there were some very informed and literate Yankees fans/sources in there..
There was also a recent oil spill that took place in the San Francisco Bay which was a horrible Eco accident and also robbed me of some final fall surfing days. I was looking for more information on the articles posted and right there in sfgate.com ...there were a number of updates on where the spill was and also some informed viewpoints on cleanup options from some professors at Berkeley...
So has the nature of editorial switched forever? I believe so... I believe that what we are starting to see is the emergence of Collective Editorial... To borrow from the book often cited that was James Suroweicki ' Collective Wisdom of Crowd's, any group of individuals is more informed and more predictive than any one expert.. Now of course this doesn't always hold true on certain topics because of say "access to new information" but I've started to see an invested group of people in the comments section across many media properties emerge that are as informed or more informed than the writer and are providing their opinion for a psychological reason rather than because they are getting paid.
I also believe that there is a credibility question when dealing with this comment section but my belief is that as you read the opinions, see a lot of people there who don't get paid express themselves... the credibility of the crowd actually goes up not down...
We are also starting to see media properties interact with their fan base first and then create more informed stories that summarize their aggregate prediction on an outcome.
I think we are reaching a tipping point on this and what I can tell you is that the way I read and consume media has changed forever.... I believe that it won't be long before we are searching into the comments and social discussion first on any topic and/or become an active participant ourselves.
Translating this to other experiences online... we've just recently launched some commenting sections on wize.com and we were impressed with the speed at which people started to interact with the site and others around products and the informed viewpoints they expressed...
Long live collective editorial! In the long run I believe we all benefit as the quality and speed of information will improve for all of us....
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