Early birds...

Just noticed that David Weinberger (!) blogged about Consumerpedia: Joho the Blog: Consumerpedia.

He has a great summary of, as he puts it, our "hierarchical folksonomy": "Anyone can create a category, a sub-category, a re-direct (= synonymn), or a related-to (= reciprocal link)."

To expand on that slightly, all of those options are reciprocal in some fashion. For example, if you suggest that A should be a linked category of B, then B also automagically becomes a linked sub-topic of A (a more complete explanation is at Consumerpedia Help).

He also raises some other good points, so here are some responses...

As to the site still being somewhat empty, please note that we still have not officially even started (we just switched everything over to a new ISP this past weekend to start to get ready to get started with the proverbial "friends and family" alpha-testers!)... but thank you for already helping to populate the site (Dweinberger - Consumerpedia)!

If all of David's readers did the same (hint hint!), it would fill up in no time at all... :-)

As to "multiple points of view," Consumerpedia is simply designed as a different type of tool for a different type of content and is thus not a wiki where, for example, Apple, Linux, and Microsoft partisans could (and most likely would) have edit wars over each other's entries, but rather where each individual comment stays as contributed and other users can make it more or less prominent depending on how helpful they judge it to be.

Short version: positive and negative comments and points of view are not written over or finessed into neutrality, but rather remain as contributed (i.e. "multiple points of view").

Those comments and suggestions deemed most helpful by other users then rise to the top while unhelpful ones sink to the bottom.

This is all backed up by a Consumerpedia "karma system" (which, when fully built out, will be roughly analogous to the Google Page Rank system). Each user will have a Consumerpedia "karma ranking" based on how helpful their actions have been as judged by other Consumerpedia users. Good karma will then become an additional weighting factor as to how much your ratings of others affect them, how much their ratings affect you, and with what rating your suggestions and comments initially start.

Short version: the more helpful others in the system judge you to be based on your actions, the more influence you have in the system (and visa versa).

We believe that this is a better approach for dealing with stuff like consumer opinions that is inherently somewhat subjective (time will tell whether or not we are right...?!)

As to differences with Epinions, aside from Consumerpedia's completely bottom-up user-driven categorization, it has never been very clear what is and is not paid inclusion at Epinions (as far as we can tell, pretty much everything is - meaning not the user-generated content, but rather the products which they allow you to comment upon - it appears that if it is not a product offered by a paid Epinion affiliate, it is not even on the Epinions site to be reviewed).

With Consumerpedia, much as with Google search engine results, the content and commerce (meaning the Google Adsense advertisements) are clearly separated. Also, you can comment on anything you want - including stuff that is not a product (stuff like companies, organizations, services, charities, industries, David Weinberger, etc). For example, should you wish to make a comment with some info about "responsible use of credit cards" the system handles it.

Basically, Consumerpedia is meant to be a simple system that will adapt and evolve to however actual users want to use it.

~~~

After writing the above, Technorati was consulted to to see what else, if anything, was out there... That led to netbib, which then led to some interesting general observations:

"Collaborative technologies are supplanting traditional channels for product tech support... Collectively, we users know a lot more about products than vendors do" (Jon Udell, InfoWorld: Open source documentation)

"But what’s lacking is the organisation of that information. Google is a very blunt instrument." (Danny Ayers, Raw Blog)

~~~

David also posted "Who’s up for a Consumerpedia vs United Nations Standard Products and Services Code System Deathmatch!" (Many-to-Many: Consumerpedia's product folksonomy) which touches to the heart of why we wanted a system that embraced and enabled a true bottom-up user-driven hierarchical tagging system - so that people could find and categorize stuff as they actually do each and every day and not to try to wedge into categories created by bureaucracies or paid inclusion ecommerce sites.

(Ok, ok, we really did it because we thought it would be a fun experiment to see if we could figure out how to build such a system, but the other points mentioned above still apply!)

It was thus amazing that even librarians appear to think that we may be on to something interesting (Information Today: Library Stuff):

Take a look at Consumerpedia and you'll understand why I feel that communities should be more involved in the ILS systems that our libraries use:

"Consumerpedia has no built in category hierarchy, but rather uses a unique user-driven hierarchical tagging system. This lets users create and define the relationships between different topics, helping others easily discover and browse related information...the Consumerpedia system is designed so that it evolves based upon how actual users wish to use it, with the sole organizing principle being how helpful it is to others."

Who uses our catalogs? Our patrons. So, why are they built for and by librarians? By having the community involved in how our catalogs are structured, they might actually make sense to the people who use it. Each library catalog will be unique to the community that helps to build it, with their own (un)structured taxonomies. Sure, there can be some underlying structure (I'm not a totally crazed lunatic), but why not contributions from our patrons in the form of open tagging structures to add to the existing catalog. It could work... (link via del.icio.us)

Also a mention at Threadwatch! Consumerpedia - One to Watch | Threadwatch.org

How Not To Blog blog gave us a great opportunity to make some additional points by posting: "Consumerpedia is a Wikipedia clone. It seems to be built to display Google adwords. (Making money for whom?). Do they really expect companies, entrepreneurs, spammers to behave with a website that anyone can edit?" (How Not To Blog - Bring in the clones.. the Wikipedia clones)

As touched on above, Consumerpedia is not a wiki and is not meant to be a Wikipedia clone. It is rather a different type of tool designed to handle a different type of content.

As to the name, the roots of the word "encyclopedia" are "medieval Latin: encyclopaedia, general education course, from alteration of Greek enkuklios paideia, general education" - thus "Consumerpedia" = "Consumer Education" (Dictionary.com/encyclopedia)

As to "Do they really expect companies, entrepreneurs, spammers to behave with a website that anyone can edit?" - while everyone and anyone can indeed add a comment or navigation suggestion (and rate those of others), note that no one can "edit" someone else's comment - you can only rate how helpful or not it is. This is one of the reasons why Consumerpedia is not based on a wiki platform.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of a wiki" - meaning that with a system like Wikipedia, since anyone can edit anything at any time, you need people who are willing and able to watch and correct "bad" edits at any time. The stabilizing factor with Wikipedia is the ever vigilant users.

"Cumulative vigilance is the benefit of Consumerpedia" - meaning that with a system like Consumerpedia, as users rate the helpfulness of comments and suggestions (and thus indirectly also rate the users who made those comments and suggestions - and also indirectly rate themselves as to how well their ratings correlate with those provided by others), the collective wisdom of what and who is good and bad (helpful and not helpful) grows over time. The stabilizing factor of Consumerpedia is the nature of the Consumerpedia system itself.

Short version: while spammers may indeed be an issue in the short run, the Consumerpedia system is designed to increasingly damp out their effect over time. The stored collected and correlated contributions of the non-spammers should (hopefully!) swamp any spam attempts over time (and no, this is not a challenge - please give us a chance to at least start building the system before trying to knock it down!)

As to why we are using Adsense, it was in large measure due to watching Wikipedia's experience with supporting their site through contributions alone. We tried to think of an easier, more natural and more direct way. Indeed, Wikipedia itself hit upon the exact same method by using Adsense in their latest venture, Wikicities.

[Checking Technorati again to see if anyone else is talking about Consumerpedia - this is a very odd experience. It is like starting to move equipment into a building to prepare to open a new restaurant, taking a break and picking up a newspaper, and reading a restaurant review about the very restaurant you are still assembling. Very cool and odd all at once...]

Wow, Steve Rubel (!) also posted about Consumerpedia (Micro Persuasion: We the Pedia) - what a day! (but looks like we need to refine our "messaging" - it is not just about products, but anything that users want to comment about - companies, organization, charities, services, whatever - a consumer information resource in the biggest sense).

Ok, 'nuff for one post... Thanks again for the mentions and the opportunity to clarify!

Comments

[David Weinberger]

Thanks for the clarification. The karma system will br crucial and I'm glad you're instituting it.

But I am still confused about how you are going to show multiple reviews since there doesn't seem to be an organized way to add a second opinion on a topic page. Relying on people using the same topic titles or linking to all related topic titles seems too haphazard. Suppose I call my review "Thinkpad X40" and you call yours "IBM X series" or whatever. How will users find all of the relevant reviews? I think I'm missing something fundamental here...

Anyway, good luck with the project. I'd love to see it succeed wildly.

[Consumerpedia]

Thanks for the kind wishes!

As a partial answer to your question, think of the mythical college campus that was initially built without sidewalks.

Welcome to that campus!

As time passes, and people start walking across campus, "dirt paths" will start to form. Once those paths are formed and become more visible, traffic will tend to converge on those paths.

Some tools and methods for making those paths and (the key part!) making them visible and self-reinforcing are already in place, others are not yet built (we were not joking that this early traffic caught us somewhat unprepared - and no, we aren't complaining!)

In essence, Consumerpedia seeks to build a system to extend the folksonomy vs controlled vocabularies debate...

"Groups will form around words, and words will form around groups, as always. We and our language will survive." (Joho the Blog: Controlled and suggested vocabularies: Are tags making us dumb?)

Part of the answer to your question will come when more users start "walking around the Consumerpedia campus." Part when the tools and methods to make those paths more visible are added in...

Thanks again for the opportunity to (hopefully!?) clarify a bit...