January 22, 2008 at 19:12From the madness of the crowd to the wisdom of the collective mind
This article of mine is at the junction of two topics that we started earlier: on the revolution of social platforms (this will be the fourth article in this series) and that does not suit me in the concept of top4top (it was only about the concept).
I don’t argue about tastes
Honestly, when I placed an abridged version of my first top4top post in Habrahabr, I expected a violent reaction like “Well, these intellectuals, there’s always something wrong for them.” With two different sub-options. First, who needs these intelligent social resources? Second - why is top4top not intelligent?
Everything turned out to be much more prosaic. According to the first option, although “black balls” fell in, they were much less than they were six months ago when my first notes appeared on the collective blog “Intelligent Social Web”.
According to the second option, unexpectedly, practically, everyone agreed with me: the new resource is very far from an intellectual title. This is the usual “glossy portal”. Therefore, the topic top4top, as such, I think you can close and move on to some thoughts arising from its discussion about ...
However, before that, to paraphrase the poet, I want to repeat once again: "If the sites are igniting, then someone needs this," or "We need different sites, different sites are important." There is no doubt that top4top will find their fans, and bigthink is its original prototype, which I also spoke about in a previous post. We need both glossy and "yellow" resources, and resources about high matters. There would be only advertisers :). I'm still looking for a slightly different ... A
little about a lot or a lot about a little?
In a previous note, it was noted that, choosing between top4top and bigthink, I would focus on the latter. At the same time he noticed that he satisfies me only by ¾. Where did the remaining quarter go? I will try to clarify.
Firstly, this missing quarter includes some rather important “little things” that I seek on the social Internet and which I tried to put into the technical task of our project . Although many of the basic requirements listed in the production note " My Space, which I can’t ... " in bigthink, fortunately, were embodied. However, this is not the main thing.
Purely for provocative (or, as they say now, for "provocative") purposes, what I wanted to see was called by me "intelligent web." Thanks to top4top and Dibrov with Novozhilov, personally. With their light hands, it finally became clear to everyone that the prefixes “intelligent” and “intelligent” did not in any way lower the commodity cost of a startup project. And users of the social web do not have to be teenagers and young people. Now it's time for me to clarify. But this will require a definition of my vision of another concept. To the two already defined in the previous article ( intellectuality and intelligence ), I want to add the third - professionalism. And we will do it in a similar way.
I define professionalismas a state of mind, which can be assessed through the same IQ, combined with special knowledge (not necessarily related to higher education) and experience. The higher the IQ, the deeper the knowledge and the more experience, the higher the professionalism. All these indicators are approximately equivalent.
Thus, as I understand it, if an intellectual is a person with extensive general knowledge, then a professional relies primarily on deep specialized knowledge. In other words, an intellectual knows a little about a lot , and a professional knows a lot about a little . In this case, a professional may be an intellectual and / or intellectual, and may not be either one or the other.
When I first talked about an intelligent web, I immediately emphasized that it is very necessarytrue professionals . Thus, it was clearly meant that only intellectuals can be true professionals. It was implicitly meant that real professionals are intellectuals as well. In other words, I refer to real professionals people who combine broad general and narrow specialized knowledge and possess an internal culture . You can agree or disagree with this approach, but this is my position, and under this position I started looking for a resource.
And again ... 80:20
No words, bigthink is a social resource for intellectuals. But, it seems to me that true professionals, and especially techies, do not have much time to give everything free to “high matters” and to the satisfaction of their common interests. But, precisely, bigthink is aimed at this.
I would like to see a single social resource in which, in accordance with the well-known 80:20 principle, I would be able to spend 80% of my time satisfying my narrowly professional interests (20% of all resources of the resource). The remaining 20% of the time is given to its overall development (80% of the resources of the resource).
Well, you ask, why are two different intelligent resources not suitable for this: a common one like bigthink and some special one? Of course, they will do, and maybe this will have to stop in the end. However, agree, it would be much more interesting in the same circle of virtual friends to discuss special issues and talk "for life". So we do in the real world. After all, each of us does not have much time for communication, like true friends, generally speaking, too ...
And now I’ll explain what narrow professional interests I’m talking about when I talk about the main time that real professionals spend on the social Internet .
Information Above All
In One NoteI have already noted the main difference between the needs of users of the traditional social web and professional business. In the first, these needs according to their priority can be arranged as follows: communication, self-expression, information, cooperation. For professionals and business people, it seems to me that the sequence of priorities is completely different, namely: information, cooperation, communication, self-expression.
Based on this approach, we can say that comprehensive support of user information activity is one of the most important tasks of a social resource for professionals. The services aimed at searching, analyzing, organizing and storing the information he needs are, it seems to me, this is what the specialist, first of all, expects from a professional resource. For me, in any case, such services are fundamental.
If we are talking about social resources, then we also expect from them comprehensive support for collective informational activities. Support that allows in the full sense of the word to turn a social resource into a powerful collective mind.Such a collective mind not only provides narrow-targeted search and selection of third-party information, but also generates new information. Whether it be large articles, full-fledged blog notes, small comments or just a replica of a specialist - everything, in the end, can help a professional to solve a specific problem facing him, unexpectedly suggest ways to solve it or throw up completely new ideas.
Sesame, open up! or Normal heroes always bypass
I have already mentioned this once well-known phrase of one fairy-tale hero Rolan Bykov. The hero who advised everyone and always go around. Then I was talking about Russian outsourcing. A similar strategy for finding workarounds is very well applied to Internet startups in the eraopen social networks .
You can read about this strategy and how it influenced the “project of our project” regarding the creation of an information-oriented resource for professionals in the full version of this article in my iTech Bridge blog .
I don’t argue about tastes
Honestly, when I placed an abridged version of my first top4top post in Habrahabr, I expected a violent reaction like “Well, these intellectuals, there’s always something wrong for them.” With two different sub-options. First, who needs these intelligent social resources? Second - why is top4top not intelligent?
Everything turned out to be much more prosaic. According to the first option, although “black balls” fell in, they were much less than they were six months ago when my first notes appeared on the collective blog “Intelligent Social Web”.
According to the second option, unexpectedly, practically, everyone agreed with me: the new resource is very far from an intellectual title. This is the usual “glossy portal”. Therefore, the topic top4top, as such, I think you can close and move on to some thoughts arising from its discussion about ...
However, before that, to paraphrase the poet, I want to repeat once again: "If the sites are igniting, then someone needs this," or "We need different sites, different sites are important." There is no doubt that top4top will find their fans, and bigthink is its original prototype, which I also spoke about in a previous post. We need both glossy and "yellow" resources, and resources about high matters. There would be only advertisers :). I'm still looking for a slightly different ... A
little about a lot or a lot about a little?
In a previous note, it was noted that, choosing between top4top and bigthink, I would focus on the latter. At the same time he noticed that he satisfies me only by ¾. Where did the remaining quarter go? I will try to clarify.
Firstly, this missing quarter includes some rather important “little things” that I seek on the social Internet and which I tried to put into the technical task of our project . Although many of the basic requirements listed in the production note " My Space, which I can’t ... " in bigthink, fortunately, were embodied. However, this is not the main thing.
Purely for provocative (or, as they say now, for "provocative") purposes, what I wanted to see was called by me "intelligent web." Thanks to top4top and Dibrov with Novozhilov, personally. With their light hands, it finally became clear to everyone that the prefixes “intelligent” and “intelligent” did not in any way lower the commodity cost of a startup project. And users of the social web do not have to be teenagers and young people. Now it's time for me to clarify. But this will require a definition of my vision of another concept. To the two already defined in the previous article ( intellectuality and intelligence ), I want to add the third - professionalism. And we will do it in a similar way.
I define professionalismas a state of mind, which can be assessed through the same IQ, combined with special knowledge (not necessarily related to higher education) and experience. The higher the IQ, the deeper the knowledge and the more experience, the higher the professionalism. All these indicators are approximately equivalent.
Thus, as I understand it, if an intellectual is a person with extensive general knowledge, then a professional relies primarily on deep specialized knowledge. In other words, an intellectual knows a little about a lot , and a professional knows a lot about a little . In this case, a professional may be an intellectual and / or intellectual, and may not be either one or the other.
When I first talked about an intelligent web, I immediately emphasized that it is very necessarytrue professionals . Thus, it was clearly meant that only intellectuals can be true professionals. It was implicitly meant that real professionals are intellectuals as well. In other words, I refer to real professionals people who combine broad general and narrow specialized knowledge and possess an internal culture . You can agree or disagree with this approach, but this is my position, and under this position I started looking for a resource.
And again ... 80:20
No words, bigthink is a social resource for intellectuals. But, it seems to me that true professionals, and especially techies, do not have much time to give everything free to “high matters” and to the satisfaction of their common interests. But, precisely, bigthink is aimed at this.
I would like to see a single social resource in which, in accordance with the well-known 80:20 principle, I would be able to spend 80% of my time satisfying my narrowly professional interests (20% of all resources of the resource). The remaining 20% of the time is given to its overall development (80% of the resources of the resource).
Well, you ask, why are two different intelligent resources not suitable for this: a common one like bigthink and some special one? Of course, they will do, and maybe this will have to stop in the end. However, agree, it would be much more interesting in the same circle of virtual friends to discuss special issues and talk "for life". So we do in the real world. After all, each of us does not have much time for communication, like true friends, generally speaking, too ...
And now I’ll explain what narrow professional interests I’m talking about when I talk about the main time that real professionals spend on the social Internet .
Information Above All
In One NoteI have already noted the main difference between the needs of users of the traditional social web and professional business. In the first, these needs according to their priority can be arranged as follows: communication, self-expression, information, cooperation. For professionals and business people, it seems to me that the sequence of priorities is completely different, namely: information, cooperation, communication, self-expression.
Based on this approach, we can say that comprehensive support of user information activity is one of the most important tasks of a social resource for professionals. The services aimed at searching, analyzing, organizing and storing the information he needs are, it seems to me, this is what the specialist, first of all, expects from a professional resource. For me, in any case, such services are fundamental.
If we are talking about social resources, then we also expect from them comprehensive support for collective informational activities. Support that allows in the full sense of the word to turn a social resource into a powerful collective mind.Such a collective mind not only provides narrow-targeted search and selection of third-party information, but also generates new information. Whether it be large articles, full-fledged blog notes, small comments or just a replica of a specialist - everything, in the end, can help a professional to solve a specific problem facing him, unexpectedly suggest ways to solve it or throw up completely new ideas.
Sesame, open up! or Normal heroes always bypass
I have already mentioned this once well-known phrase of one fairy-tale hero Rolan Bykov. The hero who advised everyone and always go around. Then I was talking about Russian outsourcing. A similar strategy for finding workarounds is very well applied to Internet startups in the eraopen social networks .
You can read about this strategy and how it influenced the “project of our project” regarding the creation of an information-oriented resource for professionals in the full version of this article in my iTech Bridge blog .