Why Smart Dossiers Matter

from the thinking-things-through dept

Two weeks ago in New York, we announced our new Smart Dossiers product, that leverages the best members of the Techdirt Insight Community to provide multiple quick, cost effective analytical looks at any company. After launching it, I received an email from a reader asking for some of the thinking behind this product and why we launched it, as he noted that I often break down the business decisions made by other companies, I might as well do so for my own as well.

Fair enough. While obviously, we've been thinking about this quite a bit in designing the product, Kevin Kelly's recent discussion on the problems with bottom-up and top-down content creation models really comes into play here as well. While I'm a huge fan of bottom-up "crowdsource" models, I'll be the first to admit that they're not right for everything. And, while some people have referred to the Insight Community as "crowdsourcing analysis" that's not quite accurate either. Crowdsourcing, bottom-up, wisdom of the crowds models work well for any type of system where you are trying to zero-in on something that appeases a wider audience. Zeroing in on factual information, for example -- which is why Wikipedia works. Or, coming up with a set of stories that will appeal to a specific group, such as how Digg picks news stories. But there are times when you don't want the aggregate views of a large audience, but you want a few viewpoints from those who understand something best. These are cases when you're really looking for insight and analysis, not just data or facts. You want creativity and a spark of something different, but you don't want to be overwhelmed.

At the same time, the traditional means of getting such insight and analysis runs into trouble in that you're betting on the single "wise man on the hill" who you hire to provide that analysis. Long ago, companies realized that relying on just a single viewpoint was dangerous. There's much more to be learned by getting together a small group of very knowledgeable, experienced experts in a space who can weigh in directly based on that experience. By having multiple viewpoints you get to learn to important things beyond just the direct insights each participant generates. You get to see where those experts agree (which can be useful) but also where they disagree, which is where you can often pick up real pieces of wisdom in understanding why two knowledgeable people disagree over the same subject.

In our own experience, it's in those kinds of brainstorms, where you line up what insights people agree on and where they disagree, that produces the most useful output. So, the Smart Dossiers product (and the wider Techdirt Insight Community service itself) is an attempt to formalize that process and allow companies to easily, cost effectively and quickly tap into a diverse group of experts who can help provide those multiple viewpoints and help companies better understand themselves, their competitors, their customers, their partners, their investments and their investors. Since we launched the Techdirt Insight Community, companies have been rating and ranking the experts in the network based on the insights they provide. With the Smart Dossiers offering, some of the best ranked members of the community are guaranteed to take part in the analysis, making sure that you only get top notch analysis. It's not about the wisdom of the crowds, but about getting multiple perspectives from experts who know what they're talking about.

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Reliability Requires Redundancy

from the peer-review dept

Slate has an interesting column by Jacob Leibenluft that compares the relative reliability of Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. He notes that unlike Google Answers, which was shuttered last year, Yahoo's answers site has become quite popular. Google paid its contributors to answer questions, but Yahoo! only offers contributors points that entitle them to ask questions of their own on the site. Unfortunately, even the service's own users acknowledge that Yahoo! Answers isn't very reliable. Often a question will attract a dozen or more answers. Some of them will probably be right, but others will be wrong, and it might be hard to tell which is which. Leibenluft contrasts that to Wikipedia which, while far from perfect, tends to have accurate information the vast majority of the time. He zeroes in on three important characteristics that give Wikipedia the edge. First, whereas Yahoo! Answers lets each user to give his or her own answer, the Wikipedia process is geared toward producing a single article that represents the consensus of all contributors. Second, Wikipedia has a strong norm of citing outside sources when contributors disagree. Usually, when there's a factual disagreement, someone will go out and find a citation in a reliable source to demonstrate the correct answer. Finally, Yahoo! Answers closes a question after about a week, whereas a Wikipedia article is open for editing indefinitely. This is important because Wikipedia articles tend to get more accurate over time, as more and more readers visit them and fix mistakes. It would be interesting for Yahoo! to experiment with a wiki-based format for Yahoo! Answers, where users collaborate on a single collective answer to the question rather than giving a bunch of individual answers. The major difficulty would be that the site's point-based reward system would be difficult to apply, since several users would have contributed to the final answer.

Techdirt's own Insight Community is similar in some ways to the Yahoo! and Google Answer programs. The failure of Google Answers might be a reason for pessimism, but I think there are a few key differences that make TIC more likely to succeed. First, the community is sharply focused on a fast-changing industry where expertise is especially valuable. Second, TIC is focused on providing insight and analysis, not just plain facts. With factual questions, a customer will typically be seeking a single correct answer. But with strategic business questions, there usually isn't one right answer; companies are often interested in hearing about several different approaches, and there can be a lot of value in seeing the arguments that experts marshal for various options. Finally, Techdirt is much more selective about the experts it brings onboard, using experts' blogs and other writings as a way of identifying those who know what they're talking about and can communicate it clearly. That gives the TIC a great signal-to-noise ratio.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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