entretags/blog

Two big projects with the motto ‘ordinary people writing history’ are being lauched this month: Einestages and Miomi

Einestages was launched last week. It is a website of Spiegel online, one of the most visited german websites, which is also part of Der Spiegel, one of the largest-circulation news magazines published in Germany.

Einestages is strongly focused on the quality of the content, all contributions are reviewed by the editorial staff before being published. Once approved the story can be linked to others. The interface is clear and the content can be found easily - the system also don’t have that much content yet. The most interesting thing I found in this website, however, is the Fudbüro (lost and found office), where people can post photos or texts and other users can add any other material they have (everything serious and review by the editors, of course).

(more…)

Started in Berlin Dropping Knowledge is a good example of what I call ‘collective narratives’. The proposal is quite interesting: by asking questions and getting different answers from people all over the world we are able to understand better how they perceive their environments. Asking questions is in a why finding out about what the other one already knows and in which way he has found out about it. (more…)

In any user-generated content system, the level of collaboration varies a lot among users. Adar and Huberman found that two-thirds of users share no files available on Gnutella. In some open source development communities the estimation is that 4% of the developers contribute with nearly to 88% of new codes, and 66% of code fixes. Something similar also happens in wikipedia.org where a highly productive small community sustain the number and the quality of its content - a community in which some members spend up to 30 hours a week volunteering their time to research and write articles (Forte & Bruckman). Jimmy Wales, founder of wikipedia, also defends that the social dynamic behind a system can improve the quality of its content. (more…)