Firstly, I don't doubt for a second that 1. the iPad will be successful or that 2. it will end up being a game changer. The more pertinent question is whether it deserves to be a success and whether that changed world will be a better one. The iPad at first glance is an enlarged iPod touch. The form factor and user interface has all the same glitz, shine and attention to detail that went into the iPhone, so it will likely be a pleasure to use. Still, the iPhone OS is a notoriously closed platform, and the question has to be, is that something we want on a tablet?

I don't actually oppose closed platforms on principle like some folks out there. I'm a huge fan of my iPhone, and part of why it's such a flawlessly executed interface is because the platform is closed. That said, I don't use my iPhone to accomplish work. I use it to check wikipedia for facts on the fly, call my parents, IM with my friends and play games while waiting for a flight. It's a pocket device and so a lack of certain features has never struck me as an issue. I'm trading off flexibility and some functionality for superior design, which is fine by me.

However, once I've got a tablet in my hands I'm starting to expect something a little more. A tablet doesn't have to be a fully functioning high powered laptop, but even Apple themselves are billing this as something you can work on. They've built a custom version of their iWork platform just for the iPad. I'm sure it's a beautiful experience, but anyone who works with word documents and spreadsheets and in general, has a job, demands a little more flexibility from their on the go computer. Primarily, anyone trying to do real work is going to want a device that multitasks, which the iPad does not.

Imagine the frustration of working on your important spreadsheet and not being able to smoothly navigate between it, your data loaded up on a word document, and the web? Instead you'll have to shut down one App in order to view the other. It's clunky, and it simply seems shortsighted for a tablet computer. 

And what about Flash? Yea, maybe, in several years time Flash will be a thing of the past as HTML5 becomes dominate, but right now, Flash is a huge part of the web. I've seen a number of jokes across the web showing mockups of the iPad displaying popular websites with that little blue square plugin-missing icon where normally rich content would be displayed. It seems hard to argue that a device that doesn't support Flash could be the ultimate web browsing experience.

When I first heard about a potential Apple tablet, what I envisioned was a touchscreen optimized version of OS X. That's an operating system that features both fantastic usability and flexibility. Also it has flash and can multitask. A real winner in my book.

It is disappointing to me that Apple didn't deliver a device that would really be a useful netbook with the kind of excellent usability that we've come to expect from the Mac operating system. Instead we have a device that may be a Kindle-killer with it's low price point and new iBooks application, but is far from the powerful tablet computer a lot of tech geeks were hoping for. 

Maybe I'll be proved wrong. Maybe I'll pick up this device and fall in love and accept all these downsides while in the thrall of all it's shiny top notch industrial design. As one of my favorite bloggers and celebrities, Stephen Fry, said:

There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects.
- Stephen Fry

I'll give it a chance one of these days, when I can wander into a bright white Apple store and fuss around with it myself. On that day, I shall surely let you know if my opinion has changed. 

So this is my vaguely half-hazard year in review. I've decided to do my own HCI spin on a top ten list, although I'm opting to restrain myself to a top five. Do not consider this anything like a real, honest heavily researched and counter-checked listing of 2009's hot trends. What this is instead will be a list of the five topics and trends that I, just myself, found significant. This is my blog after all, and I shall do with it as I please.

So, in no particular order.

Number Five: Social Networking and Blogging Simplify and Expand

Those of us who grew up clicking at keyboards and learning HTML had perhaps grown used to an online world that was populated by people exactly like us. In a way it was a comforting thing, but the world seemed to explode this year thanks in large part to efforts to simplify how we interact on the internet. The biggest arena where we saw this at play was Twitter. Demographic studies showed us in no uncertain terms that Twitter was a comfortable place for older users less familiar with technology. Why? Because it is absolutely simple to use. 

Traditional blogging too, has become so simple to set up with sites like Blogger and Typepad making it so easy to set up a blog that your grandmother could swing it. In the old days, blogs required a certain amount of html knowledge and for optimum results probably some PHP to get set up. Not so anymore. Even everyone's favorite love it or hate it social networking site, Facebook, started trying to simplify its overly complex UI this year with one massive, if ill-received redesign and a new streamlined way of handling privacy settings.  I anticipate that we'll see this trend continue for awhile before it reaches a crest and complexity starts to weave its way back in again a few years down the line. 

Number Four: Collaboration is Hot, Wave is not

In the enterprise space, collaboration has been a hot topic for several years. When a company spreads itself out across the country and across the world, it becomes critical to find technology that will lessen the burden of that distance. Microsoft's Sharepoint platform has been a go to solution for a long time, but other players are always raring to get into this race. So entered Google into the arena with a lengthy video preview of a system they were billing as a true collaboration solution: Wave. There was a lot of excitement surrounding that video and people were salivating for invites for months. Then, we had it in our hands and the general reaction was a confused "what do I do with this?" from the public. 

Note, if you are one of the 2 people left in the world still looking for a wave invite, I have a ton. Comment or shoot me an email if you'd like one.

Number Three: The Smart Phone Battles

I feel like this is the year that we all universally decided we needed smart phones. Credit for this probably lies heavily at the feet of the iPhone, who brought elegant usability and smart marketing to the consumer side of the phone business. Before, while some folks used Blackberries for personal use, the market for smart phones was really centered in the business market. Now, the hottest market for these devices is personal usage, and it is an all out battle for dominance amongst the big players. We saw RIM put out the Storm in an effort to crush the iPhone's dominance, Sprint offered up the Palm Pre and later Google's Android mobile OS started to infiltrate the marketplace. 

Part of what makes this fight interesting to me is how the UIs of these different systems were handled in marketing efforts. It's safe to say, I think, that the iPhone puts a lot of effort into making the interface simple and fun to use, and in it's advertising for the phone it focuses directly on that aspect of the phone.

It all started a few years back with the Wii and its tremendous success. This year we saw rival gaming companies Sony and Microsoft announce plans to release their own radical departures from traditional control systems. The full body input system Natal is probably the most cutting edge, and it's natural that these experiments tend to happen in gaming first, but when you look at it, we are seeing some pretty impressive work done in more traditional spaces as well. Microsoft's touchscreen table Surface has been used to great effect recently and by now with our iPhones, iPods and various other devices we are all familiar with touchscreen interfaces. It wasn't that long ago that the usual way to interact with your phone was with a clunky physical keypad of numbers. 

These newer input and interaction methods will eventually find their way onto your desktop as well. Just take a look at the work being done at 10/GUI on multi-touch for the desktop, and be amazed at what the future of your office desk might look like:

Before the Wii, video games were the property of an admittedly diverse, but all relatively hard core group of enthusiasts. The term "casual game" or "casual gamer" was not much used, and if it was, there was a bit of derision to it. On the opposite side of the fence, a group of people continued to view video games as tools of the devil and murder simulators. It's relatively amazing that in this atmosphere Nintendo was able to conceptualize a system like the Wii that brought video games a new, more warm and fuzzy, appeal. In the end this is good for both sides, and the popularity of video games has continued to increase as the years since the Wii roll by. In fact, this year it seemed that so called "hard core" gaming systems were starting to embrace the casual gamer more than ever. In particular, I'll call out the newest Prince of Persia game. In some circles this ubisoft offering got a lot of flack for reportedly being "too easy". And yet, the game still performed exceedingly well, because while it might have been easy, that lack of frustration meant that a lot of folks who are newer to games and haven't been training with their controllers for 15 years were able to jump right in and really experience and enjoy the game. 

This is a trend that, I dearly hope and believe, will continue. The way for the game industry to stay ahead is to continue to broaden the market share, and the way to do that is at heart a usability issue. There needs to be a way to let everybody enjoy video games. A good friend sums up the accessibility problem in video games much more thoroughly, and engagingly over at Pixel Poppers.

Conclusions and Wrap Up

All in all, it's been a busy and interesting year online and everywhere. Usability continues to be a huge influence all over the map. It isn't just something affecting our work on the computer, it touches just about every piece of our day as technology becomes more and more ubiquitous. Here's looking forward to what 2010 has to bring to the table. 

Best wishes to you and yours!

We've gotten used to the Dewey Decimal type systems of the world. Traditionally, even on the internet, the best way we could think of to categorize information was to put the power in the hands of skilled information architects to create taxonomies by which we could organize our piles of information. Now though, enter Web 2.0 and the tag.

Firstly, some definitions.

Taxonomy: a particular classification arranged in a hierarchical structure.

Folksonomy: a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.

Taxonomies are old and reliable methods for organizing content, folksonomies on the other hand are a new breed that came about with the advent of social bookmarking sites like delicious and photo management sites like flickr.

Both methods have their strengths and weaknesses, so now, when you're creating a new site that requires robust organization you have a decision to make: taxonomy or folksonomy or both?

The Taxonomic Approach

Taxonomies are managed. That means they have a strict structure and are completely predictable. When well designed they fit all of the content required of them and make for an easy navigational structure.

Sites like Netflix, Amazon and eBay generally benefit a great deal from using a taxonomic approach for organizing the content. A clean hierarchical structure makes for a clean navigation.

One of the reasons these sites work is that the information being organized tends to fit very well into defined categories and furthermore, those categories make immediate sense to the users of the sites.

That said, there are always places where these schemes fall short. It is up to a small group of people to define these categories, and from time to time where an item fits in the scheme is not terribly apparent. Sometimes, an item appears to fit in more than one place making it harder to find. The overlap between, say "Crime Thriller" and "Drama" is not trivial.

You can overcome that by placing items in multiple categories, but there's always an issue here with anticipating how users are going to see things. Putting together a proper taxonomy is time intensive process that ideally utilizes interviews with the user community. Not everyone has the time or the money to do taxonomies correctly. A bad taxonomy is almost worse than no organization at all. Think of it as searching for needles in 500 haystacks all claiming to have needles but that actually just have hay.

Folksonomies: A Saving Grace?

In an effort to avoid the pitfalls of a bad taxonomy, it's easy to think that folksonomies are the way to go. In this approach, you leave it on the shoulders of your user community to gradually build it's own unique organizational scheme. As content is added or discovered, the users are meant to tag that content with meaningful keywords that will help other users find that content.

The approach works best when users are adding the content themselves. On Flickr, I upload an image and quickly add some defining tags that will help the community locate it, and similar files.

Tags can be extremely powerful, but they don't necessarily solve all your organization problems. Relying on a user community to drive organization leads to some pitfalls. For example, there is no team in charge of managing the scheme and so there's high likelihood that you'll see misspellings, variations and overlapping tags that can make finding just the right piece of content quite difficult. Say I'm looking for cat pictures, but the perfect image hasn't been tagged "cat" and was instead tagged "kat". The possibility of my locating the image is small without expending a great deal of effort in my hunt.

Even if you could guarantee that every tag was spelled correctly it won't take long for a folksonomy to grow so large that it becomes unwieldy. For awhile when this concept was first introduced you often saw on sites employing it the Tag Cloud. Clouds were interesting, showing you the popular tags using font size to bring the popular ones to the fore front. This worked fine for some sites, but once there are so many tags clouds become relatively meaningless. Given the sporadic ways that users tag items it isn't uncommon to see a folksonomy that has 1000 tags, each corresponding to a single piece of content. Such an organizational structure does not really assist a user in locating anything. It would be just as easy to search a list of each item as it would be to scan the tags.

A Combined Approach

Ideally, it may be that the way to navigate the issues inherent in either approach is to push taxonomies and folksonomies together. Your taxonomy might not be perfect, but if you allow users to add tags to supplement that taxonomy it gives the community another route to the information. In addition, such an approach actually can work as a means to gather important feedback on your taxonomy itself. Those tags users add in to help you out are bits of invaluable feedback that can be used to fine tune the schema.

Regardless, each website has particular needs that have to be carefully examined before any one approach is decided on. As usual there isn't really a strict right or wrong way to do things. Everything relies on context.

Now, I might just need to go and create my own taxonomy for future Usability Shark postings. I've done a little internal debating of my own on whether it could be helpful or not. I'm leaning now, towards yes.

Now, I've been scooting around this interface for about a week attempting to figure things out and I've come to a few conclusions.

The first: Google Wave won't replace email

Why not? It's far to complicated. What makes email a powerful medium is in actuality it's pure simplicity. The learning curve for email is almost trivially small. Wave is chock full of features, but in a sense they are features that are simply more than what the average person requires and that is a barrier to entry. I want to stress though that this is not so much a criticism as it is merely an observation. Wave probably isn't seeking to solve the email problem.

The second: chat is necessary for real time collaboration

I hadn't realized this before, but in the process of attempting to plan a trip to Greece with a friend using Wave as our platform I found the lack of a true chat interface unbearably frustrating. While you can "ping" a person in Wave, that ping merely acts as a mini wave. It's fully featured, which is absolutely overkill for a quick chat, and is also saved as a separate wave from the one you are currently working on, meaning the chat information and any decisions made there are separated from the rest of your collaboration work. 

I think for Wave to really take off, it needs to have a true chat feature, one that rather than being a wave is truly optimized for chat. For me, the lack of this was so frustrating I had to supplement my work in Wave with chatting over Adium. 

The third: There really needs to be connectivity between Wave and other Google Aps.

You're welcome to attach documents to your waves, but there doesn't appear to be a way to link in Google's already relatively successful collaboration suite. Prior to using wave for our "Plan a Trip to Greece" project, my friend Shane and I had both a Google doc of information and a Google Map of places we wanted to visit. My enthusiasm for Wave was damped when it became clear I could not capitalize on this existing work within the application. I could drop in a map gadget, but I'd have had to build my whole map again from scratch.

It felt extremely limiting to not be able to bring in work completed in other places, especially considering that those other places are ... well ... Google.

The fourth: this interface is wicked confusing

I have general faith that this will improve with time, but there are a lot of little things about the Wave interface that make it frustrating to use. I won't detail all of them here, but here's a brief sampling:

1. Why the funky scroll bars? They're a little clunky and it confuses me a bit that they didn't just use standard scroll bars which work perfectly well.

2. In a long wave, how can I jump to the unread changes? Right now I can't find a way to do this. If the changes are spread throughout the wave, it's extremely difficult to move through it to find the relevant changes.

3. Nested replies get quickly out of hand: one thing, having to double click to even find these features is messy. Another, those nested replies seem to not always show up where you expect it to. As they grow, it makes following them a bit difficult. I think they perhaps would have worked better showing up in the style of notes in Microsoft office revision mode.

Conclusions....

Wave might yet prove to be a paradigm shifting project. Niggling usability issues are a part of any release like that, so it doesn't concern me overly much. However, the lack of Google Docs and Maps integration surprises me and makes me wonder how long we'll have to wait to see what I view as very necessary new features.

One other thing that came to mind as I was playing with this... will the masses, who aren't perhaps looking for a robust collaboration solution, find themselves driven to use Wave at all? I have my doubts. Most of us in our day to day lives don't require that much complexity and jumping right into it is an overwhelming experience.

On the other side of the fence we have gmail kind of quietly doing its thing. More and more it seems to me that it's gmail that could really take off as a collaboration platform that everyone can start using. Already it has integrated chat with the email client, and it's starting to build in a connection with Google Docs as well. It's a way of easing users into a more robust experience by trickling the features in over time. Not a bad approach, although maybe not a paradigm shifting one.

Some references and other opinions on Wave:

1. IT Pro agrees, Wave won't replace email

2. Mashable's opinion is generally positive

3. Louis Gray thinks Wave is way way too noisy

4. Some thoughts at CNET

Relevant quote: "Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the ratings system is primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video."

The general intention of designers when they put together a rating style system such as the one at YouTube is with the idea that ratings will be used as a way users can judge content. Unfortunately, if all your content is either not rated at all or rated 5 stars, users won't get much out of those ratings.

This isn't a universal issue though. Some sites use star ratings with great success. Take Amazon and Netflix for example. Users of those sites are diligent about rating the content and sometimes will spend time on the site for the sole purpose of rating. Why are users willing to spend time rating movies on Netflix but won't take a couple of seconds to rate videos on YouTube? The answer has to do with user motivation and the inherent selfishness of users. Now, do not take umbrage, there's nothing wrong with being a selfish user. It's the job of a site designer to encourage you to act otherwise, and if they fail, it's no skin off your teeth. Carry on.

What's important for us, the designers, is to recognize and be aware that users are inherently selfish and will be highly unlikely to engage in activities that do not offer them a benefit of some kind. No one rates videos on YouTube, because the act of rating a YouTube video does not provide you with any benefit. The only people it could, in theory, assist are the submitter of the video and some small percentage of the user community when they browse for the video. But you the rater? You don't get anything.

In contrast, if I go to Netflix and spend some time rating the movies I've watched I can actually see the recommendations improve. The more movies I rate, the better Netflix's recommendations turn out to be. Thus, I have a good motivator for continuing to rate the content. Luckily for Netflix's user base, my ratings also benefit the rest of the community. Amazon works the same way. Ratings work out exactly the way we want because there's a clear benefit to everyone when it comes to contributing.

So what if YouTube took a page from that book? What would be interesting to see is if they instituted a recommendation system that actually used those video ratings to pull up similar videos relevant to you, the selfish user, would people start using the rating system differently?

Not easy to test without some significant work, but my inclination is that yea, you'd see some changes over time.

We could probably extrapolate the general theory at work here to a lot of other features and applications. The key take away is that if you want a user to take an action, you have to provide reasonable motivation no matter how small and quick the interaction appears. For example, most discussion forums are populated mostly by lurkers, only a small percentage contributes. Designing better motivators into your design could increase participation and lead to a better overall experience.

It's food for thought, in any case.

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Livejournal
4. Flickr
5. Librarything
6. Ping.fm
7. Google Reader
8. Google Groups
9. Delicious
10. Linkedin
11. reddit

That's a lot to keep track of right there. I also have languishing but existing accounts with:

1. MySpace
2. Digg
3. Orkut
4. Yahoo Groups
5. Plaxo
6. FriendFeed

Why am I bringing up this increasingly daunting list of sites? Because in my life it is starting to become something of a usability nightmare to handle all these various accounts. Certainly, I could make my life easier - pick a site and use it exclusively - but not one of these sites gives me everything I want in one package. Furthermore, there's no one site that all of the people I want to connect with use. Thus, my problem, and a continuing problem for perhaps everyone who makes much use of the internet today.

Facebook has been making something of an effort to bring your different social networking accounts together in one place. In theory, I should be able to share a news story on Google Reader and have that update reflect in my Facebook news feed. However, that connection (as well as the connections with other sites such as Flickr) has over the past several months proven to be at the best of times not particularly usable or smooth and at the worst times simply broken.

This is where things for the user become really frustrating and complicated. I'm in Google Reader and I find a story that I just need to share with my friends. It's a one step process to get everyone following me in reader to see it, but what of my friends on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter or what if I'd also like to post it to reddit. It's time consuming and takes too much effort to:

a) decide where to post the story and

b) get the posting accomplished.

I have a vision of something much more seemless, that sits above all the other sites and acts essentially as a manager or your activity. Ping.fm, but with a broader use case.

Pause for a second, and I'll chat about Ping for those that have not used it. Simple set up - create an account and link in all your various other accounts. Once you've got that taken care of, you can post status updates to Ping and they'll be automatically sent to every account you've linked in. Having this in my life as at the least made posting status updates easier. No longer do I have to maintain different statuses for Twitter vs Facebook.

That's great, and I do love Ping. However, it doesn't solve the use case above of wanting to share out say - an interesting piece I read in the NYT. True - I could limit myself to sharing links as status updates, but that is not my general style. Additionally, it won't link in reddit or Google Reader which don't have a concept of status updates.

What about FriendFeed then you say? FriendFeed and Plaxo are great aggregaters of content posted at a variety of sites, but they don't feed the content you post there back out to other places. Aggregaters are great, and they can make life a bit easier, but it doesn't solve my problem.

No, what I want to see happen is a site where I can manage my various account and set up rules for how an action taken on one account will reflect in another. For example, a possible set of rules for a given action:

When I "share" an article in Google Reader take the following actions:

• Share the same article in Facebook
• Submit to reddit if the article URL is not already submitted
• Add link to the article to Delicious

There are a lot of possibilities here. What actions could be taken when I post to Flickr or Librarything? Perhaps I could even have a browser plugin that would let me adjust the rules on the fly for certain content.

I think this concept is a long time coming. It's relatively unreasonable to assume that users will at some point decide on a single site and stick to it. There is almost assuredly always going to be this wide array of sites that we play with and update, each with particular strengths or particular audiences. I don't want Facebook to become my RSS Reader, but I do want it to play nice with Google Reader. I don't want Twitter to become Flickr, but maybe I want to let people know when I post new photos without going out of my way.

Individual sites can make a start at this, building Facebook applications and Twitter bots and the like, but I think you won't see a real solution until someone takes the initiative to really bring sites together in a happy playground.

Something to ponder.

Next time, I'll speak to a related topic. Tagging people in Facebook statuses and how that may interfere with, or potentially enhance, @replies in Twitter and how it all works together with Ping.fm.

In the meantime, enjoy this battle of the social networking sites:

Upfront I will tell you this: none of my meandering thoughts on this have been researched.

What I suspect might be the case though is that a not insignificant portion of iPhone users don't actually know that their amazing little devices aren't multitasking. Why? Well, from their perspective they themselves are multitasking all the time with the device, especially if they have push notifications turned on. Consider the following use case:

A woman sits in the airport, a little bored waiting for a flight, so she pulls out her iPhone. She pops in her earbuds and fires up the iPod functionality before moving over to Safari for some web surfing. She runs across a video, which she clicks on which moves her over to the youtube application. When she's done she hops back over to Safari for more browsing. Along the way, she gets a phone call which is pushed to her attention. She answers it, chats, and goes right back to browsing.

From an engineering perspective, none of this is really multitasking. Each application, with the exception of the iPod which can run in the background, is loaded one at a time. Contrast this with the Palm Pre which can have all these applications running at the same time.

So why aren't more people annoyed that the iPhone works that way? Why aren't more people jumping on the Pre train for that tasty multitasking?

Short answer: that woman in the airport already IS multitasking from a user perspective. Her mental model of the phone and how it functions is completely independent of the engineering of the device. She sees herself as simultaneously listening to music, surfing the web, fielding phone calls, watching videos and monitoring her email. It doesn't get much more multitasky than that.

It's tempting for those of us who understand the guts of something to think that users ought to see things the same way. I've read through threads of conversations on this topic where critics of the iPhone call the users of said device flat out stupid for not seeing this particular limitation. But really, what's the problem? Does the user's mental model have to match up to the physical model for the device to be truly usable?

No. It merely has to closely approximate it in a way that is seamless for the user. The iPhone may not actually multitask, but it offers an illusion of multitasking that is good enough for the majority of its users and there is nothing wrong with that. 

Up until a point anyway. Enter Google Latitude.

Latitude, if you aren't familiar with it, is a web application that can track a user's physical location and publish it out to the user's various followers. A fine stalking application for those who want to be stalked. It's most useful when it can run in the background so the user does not have to take a particular action to trigger the application to do its thing.

When Google introduced the application for the iPhone they launched it as a web application (get it here) and at first that seemed ok. But, but, the iPhone doesn't multitask does it? That means Latitude can't run in the background while we go about our business of wandering off, checking email, playing Snood, and reading restaurant reviews on Yelp.

Google Latitude rather broke the delicate mental model that was keeping some users happy.

It won't surprise me to see more special cases like that start to arise. Eventually, Apple may well have to reinvestigate some of the decisions they've made with the iPhone's engineering. Maybe they'll even switch from faux multitasking to true blue multitasking. They've demonstrated that they listen to complaints about a number of things, so perhaps this too will get fixed if it truly does require fixing.

The summary is thus: Wikipedia is not really planning to introduce full moderation. What they are doing is thinking over a couple of ways that they could alleviate some of the problems I discussed in my post. Two approaches are being bandied about as you'll see in the linked article. The first is "flagged protection" which is pretty much the moderation style approach I discussed last time. This is in use already on the German version of Wikipedia.

I still feel hiding changes isn't a great idea, which brings me to approach number two. This one is called "patrolled revisions". This is a lot like what I was recommending, the edits go live immediately so everyone can see them, but the article itself is clearly noted as not vetted. 

What Wikipedia will be doing is using approach number one as a replacement for articles that are currently locked down. So in that sense, things are getting more open. They'll also introduce approach number two on other articles about living people. Aside from those, all other articles will remain the same.

So all the criticism and panic is clearly premature. I'm actually quite ok with the approach as described here.

I guess in summary, you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Even if it is in the New York Times.

Karma is that elusive number, setting, hidden voodoo that many sites of the Reddit and Digg variety use to elevate certain users above the wild fray. Karma, in theory, encourages users to submit quality content with the hopes that quality will equal higher karma. Higher karma, in turn, can also be used by the site itself to push content submitted by those users up higher than those submitted by newcomers or trolls.

Sounds pretty good doesn't it? Well, many many things have a tendency to sound good in theory and to then fall apart when us irrational human beings actually get our hands on it. Internet karma is no different.

Karma is intended to work as an incentive system, and for a lot of people it certainly does just this. That little number can become an obsession. Getting it higher, getting to be the highest, can turn into a goal that undermines the essential point of a site like Reddit. How so you ask? Well, it's the karma whore issue you see.

karma whore: originally coined at slashdot, a karma whore plays to the prejudices of the masses to get positive moderation on their comments (via urban dictionary).

There are, of course, folks who take that definition to the very extremes, but to small degrees almost every member of an online community is going to end up at least a little susceptible to this phenomenon. The reason is, after awhile posting content that doesn't see a lot of traction and never makes it to the front page, a user is likely to take one of two paths:

1. Leave

2. Start posting content they know the community likes.

So, thusly, the community feeds it's own interests and only those who are willing to play along see their karma increase.

This isn't that different from how we interact with other people offline of course. Like minds hive together, that's human nature, but what if we wanted to see something different happen in cyberspace? What if we wanted to create a community that instead of feeding our existing interests and beliefs expanded and challenged them? Karma, the way I've seen it used today, is an ideology that keeps that from happening.

On Reddit, karma accumulates if the net up votes on your submitted content goes up. Imagine a situation in which instead, the level of controversy on your content resulted in a karma increase. Instead of incentivizing the user to submit content they know will appeal to the beliefs of the community, this encourages the user to submit content that will be polarizing in some way. Net result will be a very different picture of the overall content submitted to the site. Certainly, you can view the controversial items on Reddit, but there's no system that outright encourages users to submit that kind of content.

Maybe we can go the other direction entirely. After all, the best way to firm up your beliefs is to have them challenged. Try this site idea on for size: instead of positive karma, we encourage negative karma. The more down votes you get the higher your score. 

Clearly, there's still a failing in all of these systems. That failing is that it is still always possible to game the system. So what if we abandon the idea entirely, at least as a visible, measurable entity. Hide the karma from users and tweak the algorithm on the back end to get your desired results. Will users still submit content if they aren't 'rewarded' in some fashion? I think so, provided your algorithm still works well enough that interesting, varied content crawls its way to the top. 

So, karma, be it good or bad or controversial, certainly produces interesting dynamics in an online community. I'd love to see it used in a more varied or dare I say, backward fashion.

Keep it real guys, and keep your karma whoring to a minimum.

The big news in social media lately, at least from where I'm sitting, is the slow introduction of moderation to the enormously successful Wikipedia. The New York Times reported today that in a matter of weeks users of Wikipedia will be faced with a new barrier to entry, so to speak. Articles about living people will now be protected, and edits to them will have to be approved by a "trusted" editor (still a volunteer, notably).

2. Journalist David Rohde Spent 7 months in captivity after being kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan. An editor at Wikipedia repeatedly tried to update the site with this information only to have it continually pulled down. Turns out, Wikipedia was in cahoots with the NYT to keep Rohde's kidnapping a secret, reportedly in order to increase his chances of survival. (explanation, from the NYT)

3. In 2005 the Wikipedia page for John Seigenthaler, Robert Kennedy's Administrative Assistant in the 1960s, was edited claiming the man was connected to the Kennedy assassination. The offending information was removed at Seigenthaler's request by Wikipedia administration. (in his own words) 

4. More humorously, in 2006 Stephen Colbert encouraged users of Wikipedia to log on to the site and edit articles on elephants to indicate that their population had tripled in the last six months. Not long after, nearly 20 articles on the site had been accordingly vandalized and had to be locked. Colbert's account was also blocked. (more details) 

I could probably hunt up various other examples of shenanigans and outright vandalism of more a more sinister kind if I liked, but this probably suffices. It is certainly enough to show why the founders and key players at Wikimedia Foundation would be thinking about moving towards a moderation model. Still, are these good enough reasons to fundamentally change the spirit that has gotten Wikipedia where it is today?

The original NYT article argues that given Wikipedia's significance and ubiquity it is critical that it be carefully moderated to avoid the kinds of issues I listed above. There is a genuine fear here that false information could quickly be spread with no oversight. Those obituaries quoting Jarre from Wikipedia certainly did not bother to do any significant source checking resulting in misinformation on Wikipedia suddenly being backed up by seemingly more powerful sources.

That's relatively compelling at first glance, but should Wikipedia necessarily be picking up the slack for decidedly lazy reporting? I don't think so, and to play devil's advocate, I think a restricted, moderated Wikipedia is flawed in some significant ways.

Firstly, Wikipedia was initially created as an experiment, if you will, to see what would result if you created a free encyclopedia run by volunteers that anyone, literally anyone, could edit. The result? The most popular source of information on the internet today. Whenever you google for something, the first results are nearly always from Wikipedia. That's a testament to the power of that initial experiment. In a way, it proves it worked.

Would moderating content change that? Yes, in some ways it will. Now the power to actually update the information will lie in the hands of an elite group of editors, specially selected. That creates a barrier to entry for some folks. It also means that all the power lies in these people's hands. Not to jump to conclusions, but imagine what this would mean if that group of editors had a particular political bend. The information making it onto the site may well turn out to be biased.

Is that a reasonable risk? What about all that potentially false information that gets out there when there isn't any moderation? Well, I for one want to lean towards the side of openness. What we forget about in the stories above is that they were eventually revealed, reported on and corrected. Potentially there are examples that were not, but what's wonderful about every Wikipedia article is that there is this often overlooked tab: "discussion". Here there's a running conversation on why certain edits were made and debates about whether something should be changed. It can get down to pointless minutia, but what's wonderful about it is we all have access to see those discussions. Add in a moderation level, and we have no idea what changes were proposed, which were rejected, and why.

There is actually another, mid-point solution. You can have openness + moderation, and I think this is a good direction to go. Envision this: a user submits an edit on an article. As soon as they click save, it's viewable to the whole Wikipedia viewing public, with one difference, it's visually denoted as being a pending, unverified change. As soon as the moderators have a chance - they can clear it for permanent inclusion, or reject it. Rejected edits should be saved and viewable and should always be shown with the reason for the rejection.

I fully understand the reason for wanting moderation. It's a natural progression for any online community as it grows to critical mass. Still, the openness of Wikipedia has always been a fundamental part of it's ethos and power. You don't have to give that up necessarily. In fact, you shouldn't have to give it up at all.

Read the Original NYT Article Here