#5 - Where To Go With Your Web 2.0: Quantity Or Quality?
As you consider taking your site Web 2.0, it's helpful to be clear about your focus. What's more important to you, quantity of content, or quality of content?
In the previous article of this article series we examined the "Cocktail Party Model" of Web 2.0 and discussed some of it's limitations.
In this article we want to explore an alternative to the Cocktail Party Model, which this author has decided to label, Web 2.5.
Welcome to...
The Letter To The Editor Model
Few of us writing for a living online have training as writers. In fact, many of us may have never once worked with an editor.
If you're an amateur writer like me, and have never worked with an editor, you really should try submitting an article to your local paper's Letter To The Editor department. It's free, and watching your words be processed by a professional editor can be quite educational.
More to the point, the Letter To The Editor section of our local paper offers an example of what we might call Web 2.5.
Everybody in the community is invited to participate, but only the best letters are published, and they are reviewed and improved as needed by editors.
How can we apply this concept to our own publications?
Going Web 2.5
Here's a good example from Net business history.
You old timers will remember the I-Sales Digest from the mid to late 90's. I-Sales was a daily email publication, and the leading Net business journal of it's time.
Here's how it worked.
All readers were invited to submit posts to the editor John Audette. If your post was timely, on topic, and offered interesting insights, usually your post was included in an upcoming issue.
But not always.
Sometimes the conversation would have moved on past the topic you wrote about.
And sometimes your post just wasn't as good as others that had been submitted, and so it was declined.
The bottom line was that space was limited, so if you wanted to be heard, you needed to have something useful to say, and you needed to say it reasonably well. Not perfect, but reasonably well.
As best I can recall, John rarely edited your post. He either ran it or he didn't.
In my opinion, this is probably a wise strategy for the Web, where few of us are mature enough writers to partner with an editor. :-)
Why Does Moderating Matter?
The end result of this process was a reading experience that brought us only the best of what the Net business community had to offer.
Only the best.
Let's think about that.
How busy are we?
Do we have time to read any article that anybody submits?
Or would we rather read only the best?
In the I-Sales Digest, the ego needs of the writers were compromised a bit, in order to provide readers with the best possible experience.
The best possible experience.
Yea, that sounds like what I want as a reader.
I-Sales Digest eventually went the way of all things on the Net, it passed in to history. Email ad revenues collapsed around the turn of the century.
But the publishing principles involved live on, and can serve us well today.
We can call this Web 2.5.
Or the Letter To The Editor Model.
Or perhaps it's easier to use a more familiar term, and just call it a moderated discussion.
Whatever we want to call it, we Web writers should be clear that editors have been a central part of the publishing business from the very beginning, hundreds of years before the invention of the Net.
There's a good reason why this is so, and we writers of the Web should understand that reason.
Quantity Or Quality?
In any case, you can see the main difference between open discussions and moderated discussions.
Open discussions like the Cocktail Party Model prioritize the quantity of the content.
Moderated discussions like the Letter To The Editor Model prioritize the quality of the content.
Which Is Better?
We can return to the topic of this site, word of mouth advertising, by asking this question.
Which type of content is more likely to generate word of mouth buzz?
A big discussion?
Or a quality discussion?
It's your site, only you can decide.
In the next article we'll explore both the benefits of moderating the discussions within your online community.
