Recently, inventor and writer Mark Pesce blogged about web 2.0 and underlying motivations for why people engage collaboratively on crowdsourced web projects. What I like about this post is how he has grounded design theory in a number of social behaviours that drive web 2.0 and social media: sharing, connecting, contributing, regulating, and iterating. It is a very good discussion of value in today’s standards of web content, where relevance and currency is dependant on the openness of your data.
When you think about your design – both technically and from the user’s experience – you must consider how open you want to be, and weigh the price of openness (extra work, unpredictability) against the price of being closed (less useful). The highest praise you can receive for your work is when someone wants to use it in their own. For this to happen, you have to leave the door open for them. If you publish the APIs to access the data you collect; if you build your work modularly, with clearly defined interfaces; if you use standards such as RSS and REST where appropriate, you will create something that others can re-use.
Mark Pesce – The Soul of Web 2.0 (Nov 2010) (read the whole post)
Comments are closed or deactivated
Thanks for posting that Liz. I seem to be reading Mark quite a bit lately. (I was just reading his post on Wikileaks over brekkie!
http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=446 )
Mark is dead right. I think the other thing that is vital is- dare i say it?- ‘intelligence’- relevant data data gathering- self determined data by contributors so that contributors can find each other. Moderations and modulations.
I also love this quote from his Soul of web post:
One of my favorite lines comes from science fiction author William Gibson, who wrote, ‘The street finds its own uses for things – uses the manufacturer never imagined.’ You can’t know how valuable your work will be to someone else, what they’ll see in it that you never could, and how they’ll use it to solve a problem.