The Virtual Gardener
The place where I explore online community cultivation, propagation and harvesting techniques.
I've been working as head of consultancy at Sift for the last four years. The business supports all organisations looking to respond to a Web 2.0 world and truly engage with their audience - and has been doing so for the past 10 years.
This blog originally started out as a comment on a conference I attended about online communities. I'm now using it as a thought-bin for related stuff. Any gaps in posting doesn't mean I've stopped thinking ...
Data, information and conversation (aka knowledge)
The essence of Weinberger’s thinking (perhaps) is unscrambling these three types of content. He thinks we’ve muddled them up to the point that we’ve reinterpreted ourselves as information. Worse, we think that data is information. In other words, all I have to do (and some guy reckons he’s going to achieve it by 2029) is migrate my brain into a computer and I can live forever!
The physical management of information (stacking books on a shelf and retrieving them) doesn’t scale. Physical control doesn’t scale (“unless you’re in China”). Databases are great for storing loads of data. We have a super-abundance of both good and bad, which is why a new principle of organisation is required to make sense of it. Amazon is a great example of a plethora of ways of finding and organising information (data in context - my definition, so you can challenge it!).
Conversational knowledge is the stuff in your head and the head of others - in Weinberger’s words “knowledge is between us, not in our heads; conversations are smarter than the people having them”. That works for me, which is why talking with others at a conference is far more informing than listening to the speakers and why Wikipedia has both authority and credibility because of its willingness to admit that it’s fallible and needs help.
Increasingly, Weinberger predicts, the ‘authoritative’ voice will become less credible.
