Slashdot Mirror
Using Social Networking Tools to Write a Book
WikiTiki writes "Safari Books Online has a new interview with Barry Libert, one of the authors of 'We are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business.' Barry and his coauthors decided to create a wiki and invite the community to help build this book which aims to give advice on using social networking tools like blogs and wikis to businesses. Barry has some interesting comments about both the challenges and payoffs in using social networking tools to create a book about social networking tools."
I have to admit that I'm a bit skeptical about the premise that bringing more people into a problem will somehow make it better. Usually, the biggest disasters that have befallen mankind have had a committee in it somewhere, and a lot of this collaboration stuff really just is a way of even forming bigger committees. At some point, anything genuinely great happens because an individual groks the whole thing and jumps to the center of the stage with an answer. Sure, Linux has a bunch of contributors, and that's cool, but if you look in a bit more closely, it's really a federation of projects driven by a bunch of maniacal owners and visionaries.
This is my sig.
Interestingly, the game you describe was played, almost exactly. Kasparov played the MSN chess community, and beat them after a rather long game. The fact that it was a rather long game is less surprising when you realise that the game was in no way mob rule, but was in fact guided on what moves to vote for by four or five officially appointed chess masters. Other similar projects which lacked this fudge factor ended rather earlier, it seems.
Sorry for the inflammatory subject line, but I am the author of a best selling travel guidebook to Nicaragua http://www.gotonicaragua.com/. Travel guidebooks are one area that are the frequent subject of ill-fated "let's do a travel wiki" ideas that immediately turn into steaming piles of horse crap. Here's why: the crowds are stupid; many can't write, and everyone's pushing an agenda.
The reason why travel guidebooks continue to sell in the Internet age is because the Internet is a huge, unfettered mixing bowl of ignorance. People are still willing to turn to professional writers and editors to sort through all the horse crap and turn it into something concise, concrete, and helpful. I too would prefer to pay $17 for a book for my next trip to Morocco than trawl through the Internet forums trying to separate fact from fiction from propaganda.
These travel wikis come and go, but they all bear the same characteristics: huge number of Google ads, a couple of lame wiki posts that two or more prolific authors debate back and forth without conclusion, and huge chunks of background material, insight, or commentary. The masses can't produce that, and anyone who's ever participated in a corporate meeting where 7 people need to come to a conclusion about something they differ in opinion about, knows why.
There's a place for this kind of approach, but mass authoring as I've seen it done, only works if one person is the lead author and has near dictatorial privileges and the diplomacy and savvy to use that power wisely. If you let the madhouse run the party, you get a madhouse. And that's why people like me can still earn the big bucks selling travel information to a place like Nicaragua in the Internet age.
By the way, I helped introduce Linux to Nicaragua. That ought to be worth something on Slashdot! http://therandymon.com/content/view/68/98/.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
This was tried on the C2 wiki (the first web wiki, actually), at least as a "story", and it was a disaster. Part of the problem was that everybody had a different idea of the kind and style of book it would be. It was hurky jurky, going from one style to another.
In one paragraph it may go into detail about the beauty of the main love interest of the story, and then in the next paragraph a meteor smashes into her, killing her.
The next few chaptures talk about how the detective tries to prove that the meteor was a man-made conspiracy. Then somebody made the detective part of the conspiracy, which triggered a fight over whether it should really be a nested house-of-mirrors novel or not. The sci-fi nuts and the mystery nuts got into a fat holy war.
Then somebody changed the meteor into a plane-crash to make it more "normal", but didn't bother to change all the references to the meteor and astronomer consultants.
It is kind of like improv Jazz: fun to play, but not always fun to listen to.
Table-ized A.I.
A chess grandmaster would easily beat the whole of /. if we were voting for our moves. In fact the only way to make "we" smart enough to win such a game would be to have another grandmaster vetoing the choices.
Chess is an example of linear application. You can only make one choice at a time. Its easy to scale to one person or computer.
This is why a computer can beat Gary and a group of humans can't. Now if the task is parallel then many persons can help.
Take your old animation houses for Disney. It doesn't help them that they have the next Leonardo Da Vinci on staff if he can only draw 100 frames of animation per hour. They need a team of 100 persons working independently to create their feature film in a reasonable amount of time.
I suppose the same could apply to writing novels or any task that can have multiple tasks completed at the same time.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)