Privileged voices in social software
The discussion reminds me of Barry Diller's conversation at Web 2.0 last month.
Barry's a skeptic on user-generated media. He believes (and I think this is almost definitionally true) that talent is not evenly distributed. Some people's talents are greater than others.
[A commenter identifies himself as being from Microsoft, the heads in the room swing around to see.]
Even within a single person, talents are not evenly distributed. Somebody might be more interested in hearing my thoughts on historical linguistics or the online recruitment business, and much less interested in my opinions on professional tennis or the history of haute cuisine.
[Oh my, now we have a four-box grid diagram on the screen. Is there anything at all that can not be better explained by putting it on a Cartesian grid?]
As a result, Barry's view is that there is not great talent out there hoping to self-publish. Great talent is now, and will likely always be, driven towards mass distribution, not the user-generated self-publishing model.
So where, within Social Software, do we find the place to provide privilege, to augment those voices that have something valuable to say and decrement those voices that do not?
[And I agree with Bud that the IRC window live on the screen is very distracting.]
[Tags: CoranteSSA Corante SocialSoftware]
