modadmin

It’s strange how the abundance of news shares some territory with the scarcity of news.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s description of “news that you can trust” in a dictatorship parallels what’s happening with news in social media: who do you trust?

With a new mix of Kulaap’s music from DJ Dao streaming over my stereo, I sit down at my little kitchen table, pour my coffee from its press pot, and open my tablet.

The tablet is wondrous creation. In Laos, the paper was still a paper, physical, static, and empty of anything except the official news. Real news in our New Divine Kingdom did not come from newspapers,or from television, or from handsets or ear buds. It did not come from the net or feeds unless you trusted your neighbor or look over your shoulder at an Internet cafe and if you knew that there were no secret police sitting beside you, or an owner who would be able to identify you when they came around asking about the person who used that workstation over to communicate with the outside world.

Real news came from whispered rumor, rated according to the trust you accorded the whisperer. Were they family? Did they have long history with you?

The Gambler
© Paolo Bacigalupi 2008
In Fast Forward 2 / edited by Lou Anders.

A very timely conversation about anonymity and identity has been going on since Saturday. It started with a discussion on Twitter between Mathew Ingram and Howard Owens. Mathew has written a great post about it, then Steve Buttry added important points on his own blog. I say “timely” because suddenly a lot of people are talking about anonymity. I have participated in several discussions about it in Quebec French media during recent weeks and wrote a post on my French blog.

This flurry of activity seems to show that traditional news media begin to feel that the anonymous comments that most of them allow on their Web site are not enough for readers involvement, a sentiment well summed up by Jay Rosen:

@mathewi I agree about persistent identity. I agree that hosts getting involved is key. And I think that anonymity has become a big problem.

This is good news.

The discussion is so wide that I think it can be helpful to frame the topic a little more. Online communities have debated and experienced anonymity long before news media landed on the Web, so we have a vast pool of knowledge to tap from.

As Steve Buttry points out, anonymity and identity are not an either/or question. At Worth1000, for example, the range of ages among members goes from 12 to 80, so anonymity is mandatory, but with an unique and persistent identity. A second identity is a banning offense.

Whereas at MetaFilter, only registered members can post but the basic rule is simply “stable identity”: the degree of openness is chosen by each member. As examples from the front page, we can see that stringbean is anonymous; KokuRyu is half-anonymous (he doesn’t reveal his real name but links to his website); and brundlefly, without giving his name, offers links to his other pages on delicious, flickr, facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. (aggregated identity is the best kind). Furthermore, it is allowed to have two identities on condition that they never interact. Also anonymity can be granted on request to ask a question, but only on a case by case basis.

The most significant lessons from MetaFilter and other communities are that

• there can be several degrees of identity, either decided by the site or by the member,
• and these different degrees can vary from one context to another, on the same site.

What is clear here, and what must be stated from the start, is that this discussion is about reader participation in online news media. The rules could be (and are) different in other kinds of communities.

So the first helpful question is “What?” What do we want from our readers?
Jeff Jarvis has swiftly pointed a major hurdle:

we *allow* people to comment on *our* work when it is *done.* insulting

People familiar with his blog and his book What Would Google Do? know exactly what he means: that readers should be involved in the whole news process, from choosing the topic to participating in research to commenting, to adding information and following up.

We are here and now in the river of news, not in a “journalists-write/readers-comment” universe anymore.

So, I think that “What we want from readers” has a huge role in helping us decide what we do with anonymity and identity. And from Mathew’s and Steve’s posts, we can see that we might want different things from different people in different contexts: sources, topics, news, questions, answers, opinions, votes, pictures, etc.

Which leads us the second question: Why? Why would we want readers to be anonymous?

If this is about “protecting absolutely the anonymity of a source”, I am not sure that we are able to guarantee it. But every news media should provide a tutorial on how to use anonymizers.

There is also the question of access: anonymity allows readers to post without having to go through the hassle of registration. I think that this is what Mathew Ingram means when he writes in his post:

I believe that one of the principles of running a media site is that you should open up interaction to as many people as possible.

I see two points here. The first is that I agree with Mathew that involvement should be progressive. If the objective is participation, we have to offer a scale of participation from the most simple involvement (anonymous voting as in The Huffington Post, for example), to full identity with access to all past contributions (as for Mathew Haughey in MetaFilter, for example).

The second point is that I think that “opening up” is not the same as “publishing”. There is already a lot of noise in communities with registered members and we all know that anonymity breeds noise. Sure, there is the slashdot system, which is certainly one of the marvels of the Web: long time members rate comments from 1 to 5 and readers can choose what level they want to read from 1 (all) to 5 (top of the crop).

But as much as I love the slashdot system for rating comments, I believe that a news media on the Web is not in the same business as slashdot. Here, we are entering the economic territory that is the topic of my work in mediamachina but, briefly: before asking “Why should we have anonymous contributors?”, we have to answer “Why do we want contributors at all?”. There are probably a lot of answers to that one. Clay Shirky would probably say: “Because they are there“. In The People Formerly Know as the Audience, Jay Rosen quotes Jeff Jarvis:

“Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose.”

If you read Steve Buttry and Jeff Jarvis, you know that the only way for news media to survive and prosper on the Web is through the participation of our communities.

So we have a huge incentive to involve people in our processes: survival. We want to welcome our readers, we want to encourage participation, we want to reward contributions, we want to build trust. In a nutshell: because trust is the royal road to commerce.

It means that we are in it for the long haul. I am not so sure that we should be interested in drive-by anonymous shooting. Sure, we need to help our readers and our journalists to learn how to collaborate. So anonymity can be granted at an entry level. But the long term objective of a vibrant community is to have trusted members with a persistent identity. This is probably not for all our present readers. We know the standard numbers in community participation: only 10% of our readers will participate and only 1% will become regular collaborators. Anonymous people are not part of these 10%.

So, finally, comes “Who?” Who can be anonymous?

- Sources who need to be protected: this is a tough one.
- Visitors at an entry level: in that case, anonymity must be seen as a first step and further steps should be provided, with incentives.
- People who prefer to have a persistent identity with an alias. The progressive solution of MetaFilter is a good blueprint.
- Anonymity can be granted in special cases one post at a time.

BUT, but, but, before I (at last) end this post, I have absolutely, imperatively to say that moderators should not be anonymous. Hm. Maybe I didn’t express myself clearly enough: some readers can be anonymous sometimes but

MODERATORS SHOULD NEVER BE ANONYMOUS!

I am surprised when I visit the greatest news media in the world (at least in New-York, Montreal, London, Paris) and not only moderators are anonymous but some of these media outsource moderation! I know: it goes hand in hand with the idea that moderation is akin to police duty.

It isn’t. Moderators and admins are the most important members of a community. But they are “Members”. Moderators are people. Community is about people. Moderation is about being part of a community, about exchanging with other members, about helping, about explaining, about conversation. And, yes, occasionally about banning. Anonymous police forces have no place in a community. Please listen to cortex.

Steve Buttry has begun to recruit his staff. He is the new Director of Community Engagement at Allbritton Communications, preparing the launch of a new Web site in the DC area, one of the most expected new project of newsmedia on the Web.

Steve Buttry has just be named last month Editor of the year by Editor and Publisher.

The simple text of the first 4 job descriptions illustrates perfectly the skills needed in a new newsmedia:

Senior Community Host:

Duties will include:

leading community engagement in coverage of breaking news;

recruiting and managing relations with community bloggers;

moderating community conversation in live chats, discussion forums and site comments;

handling community-submitted content;

managing special community-engagement projects, such as events and contests;

coaching and mentoring other community managers.

We’re looking for an experienced digital journalist with involvement in community engagement avenues such as blogging, crowdsourcing and social media.

[[I applaud here the use of  "community host", instead of "manager" or even "editor".  Buttry's choice of words shows his understanding of the issues and his innovative strategy. "Host" sends the clear message that community is first about welcoming and hospitality.]]

Community host:

You will be a part of a team of community managers who will undertake a variety of duties, including:

recruiting and managing relations with community bloggers;

moderating community conversation in live chats, discussion forum and site comments;

handling community-submitted content;

managing special community-engagement projects, such as events and contests.

Journalism experience helpful but not required. Applicant must be involved in digital engagement avenues such as blogging and social media. Work may include evening, weekend and holiday duties.

Social media producer:

We want someone to lead our efforts to engage with the community through social media. While you will take the initiative in developing the duties of this position, some of them will be:

managing social media outlets, such as Twitter feed(s), Facebook fan page(s), YouTube and Flickr channels;

monitoring and responding to social media references to our work;

aggregating social media content for linking to or posting on our site;

promoting our content and community-engagement opportunities using social media; using Twitter and other social media to crowdsource breaking news stories, supplementing staff coverage;

planning tweetups and other social-media-oriented community events.

We’re looking for an experienced digital journalist who uses social media extensively for personal and professional purposes.

Mobile producer:

We want someone to lead our efforts to engage with our community through mobile devices. While you will take the initiative in developing the duties of this position, some of them will be:

planning and executing mobile engagement projects;

managing and producing mobile-focused content;

working with tech staff to ensure quality of mobile site;

working with social media producer to plan and execute strategy for mobile-focused social media;

working with tech staff on mobile apps.

We’re looking for an experienced digital journalist who’s an avid user of mobile devices and has ideas for engaging the mobile audience.

This is very exciting. I’ll bet he has already received 1000 applications.

Can the content produced by readers be a part of a magazine? This is crucial question that a lot of media are asking.

Paul Ford, Web Editor of Harper’s Magazine, tells first in a conversation with journalist Choire published in Awl:

What I wish I could do is take our tens of thousands of nice registered subscribers and offer them a Metafilter-style community – something where they could create the content and talk and interact (with editors) and then we could promote the most interesting stuff to the home page.

Of course this quote is found by a member of MetaFilter and kittyprecious posts it on the site. There, moderator Jessamyn West remarks:

It’s just a pipe dream at some level. But people who run magazines would kill for the sort of community we have here. And most people that run community blogs would kill for the sort of income that magazines [still] make, relative to what most blogs make. So we sort of meet in the middle and talk about it. And it’s an interesting conversation.

Happily, it doesn’t stop there because Paul Ford is also ftrain, a member of MetaFilter, and he adds these precisions:

My point was that MetaFilter is one of the best communities on the web and that if comments are about community, and not just about traffic, then as a nat’l magazine Harper’s would be well-served to emulate the blue [MetaFilter], and maybe the green [Ask MetaFilter] and the gray too [MetaTalk].

Is this true? I don’t know. I doubt I have time to build it this year.

The thing that always strikes me about MetaFilter is that it’s a real editorial success. I’ve now spent nearly a decade (judging from the sign-up date of my first sock puppet, in the 300s) watching editorial norms emerge here. It’s not the same kind of editing that is done at a magazine — sometimes, sure, posts are killed or edited or helped along, but the goal is not necessarily to make every post better but rather to make the community better. It’s sort of like editing a river. Have you ever tried to edit a river? It’s hard, and the moderators here are genius. They have an art and a craft and a discipline. They keep the community working, and that attracts the right kind of people. It’s an amazing loop. It has much to teach me.

In the future I wonder if there isn’t a way for the different kinds of editing to combine. Could that be good for the web AND for magazines/radio/etc.? Interesting, useful communities where many people share a common sensibility, connected to — but not utterly dependent upon — more traditional media (like articles, or stories, and so forth).

Now, if you are in charge of a magazine and you are thinking that this is a good idea, you may wonder how something as MetaFilter has been built.

This is your lucky day because Matthew Haughey, MetaFilter founder, has just been interviewed on this topic by journalist Suemedha Sood.

I can’t recommand enough this interview to anybody interested in creating a community. A few quotes:

What about readership?
Matt: It’s continued to grow and grow — about 10 percent every few months, doubling every year. My Google analytics say there are about 17 or 18 million pages viewed by 7 million people around the world each month.

(Besides its founder, MetaFilter employs one full time programmer, two full time moderators and a part time moderator.)

What makes Metafilter a success?
Matt: I’d like to think it’s intense moderation and customer service.

I have begun to publish my work media machina, 10 years in the making: the quest for business models for news on the Web.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Video: Ouvert 5 Catherine Genest 2009

used with permission of the artist

The move from modadmin.com is finally done!

I was planning to create a new site for a work in progress called “media machina” and I used this opportunity to move all my blogs under one domain, boutotcom.com, and one platform WordPress MU, and here we are at last.

It’s time to thank Robin Millette from Waglo Labs who has originally created this blog on Drupal and has taken care of it for years, and then did the hard work to move the content to WordPress; unfortunately, the comments have not followed, but I keep the original archives and we plan to find a way to bring them back;

also Patrick Tanguay from taste of blue who installed the new WordPress MU at iWeb, wisely helped me to chose  the theme Shantia by Nofie Iman and created the original design before leaving for Berlin;

and finally Francis Laplante from iXmédia who did the integration of the boutot.com domain, showed me the ropes and did the final set-up.

Thank you all for your patience that used up all my attempts at procrastination.

Part of my ongoing collection of (apparently) unrelated quotes:

warrenellis I appear to gain more followers when I don’t actually post anything. I consider this to be a valuable lesson about the internet, and life. 7 minutes ago from web

hrheingold 74% of the earth’s population are social media strategists 17 minutes ago from web

mpesce Having massive brainwave. Had no idea it was coming on, then WHAM, there it is. Beautiful, terrifying, and will not be ignored. 7 minutes ago from web

Last summer, I was talking on the phone with Mitch Joel about an article I was writing and he kept telling me I should read Clay Shirky‘s book Here Comes Everybody. I told Mitch I had read all these excerpts and all Clay’s interviews in 999 blogs and that was enough for me. Did I say that Mitch really insisted? And that he is a convincing marketer? So I bought the book, kept it at my bedside and sipped maybe 2 or 3 pages at a time during these past months.
Of course Mitch was right. Of course the book is a must read. It’s about how we all came to be there, in communities and social networks. While reading, I marked pages with 100 dollars bills of Monopoly money from a bundle a friend had given me (long story). Now I have finished the book and I just went through the 100 dollars pages. The following quotes are not representing Clay Shirky’s essential book. Go buy it. They are just quotes I keep because they are great and I could write an article with each one of them. Consider I just wrote 8 posts.

How we have become filters:

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter.

Communities are good and feel good:

Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate, or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another.

Journalism crisis:

Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between a difference in degree (more of the same) and a difference in kind (something new). What we are witnessing today is a difference in sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind.

People are important to people:

We gather together because we like to, and because it is useful. (…) cities don’t exist just because people have had to be nearby to communicate; cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital.

Giving a platform and doing nothing:

Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another.

Acting on a troll in Wikipedia (same process as with graffiti) :

… he or she had spent the better part of an hour lovingly crafting those three fake entries. I deleted all three in about a minute and a half; the prankster never returned, presumably disappointed by the speed with which fake entries could be undone.

Moderating communities 101:

… a basic truth of social systems: no effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance.

The individual is mightier than the marketing plan:

The transistor and the birth control pill (…) were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. This is what is happening again today.

Mark Pesce continues to publish installments of his next book the human network. I quote here a few sentences related to collective intelligence and collective knowledge tools from his last chapter: Crowdsource Yourself.

The first problem in intelligence augmentation: how do you make a human being smarter? The answer: pair humans up with other humans.

Given that we try to make decisions about our lives based on the best available information, the better that information is, the better our decisions will be. (…) every time we use (—-*) to make a decision, we are improving our decision making ability. We are improving our own lives.

Douglas Engelbart’s original vision of intelligence augmentation holds true: it is possible for us to pool our intellectual resources, and increase our problem-solving capacity.

—-* mark Pesce had written “Wikipedia” here but, as he acknowledges a few lines further: … Wikipedia is really only one example of the many tools we have available for knowledge augmentation. Every sharing tool – Digg, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, and so on – provides an equal opportunity to share and to learn from what others have shared. We can pool our resources more effectively than at any other time in history.

back-to-the-landism.

Why are so many people suddenly entertaining the thought of the imminent death of Web 2.0? As I understand it, Web 2.0 is just beginning to be used by mass media and businesses: their managers are curious about it, they are giving contracts to explore how it could work for them. The light of dawn is appearing on the horizon, but the landscape is still bathed in Web 1.0 darkness.

So many of us are interconnected that I am sure we can find people proclaiming the end of Web 2.0 as soon as Tim O’Reilly coined the idea in 2004. A good overview of the present “crisis” is given by Scott Loganbill in monkey_bites.

It really comes down to what meaning you give to Web 2.0. In 2005, when Tim himself gave a very thorough and complex explanation, I had the idea of copyrighting a very simple one: “Web 2.0 is about people”. I was working at the time on an urban community project with Sylvain Carle, now CTO of Praized. When I told him my copyrighting idea, he just typed the words in Google and, with his usual laid back attitude, turned toward me his laptop screen. There weren’t 1690 results as there are today, but certainly a hundred.

Too bad for my (flawed) idea of owning this definition, but it is still the most simple, clear and useful one today: “Web 2.0 is about people“: Web 1.0 is the Web of broadcasting sites, of one to many, of push. Web 2.0 is the Web where you interact with real people, one by one, whom you can identify, welcome, respect and memorize.

Web 1.0 is based on messages.
Web 2.0 is based on one person at a time.

Web 1.0 is the Web of products.
Web 2.0 is the Web of relationships.

Web 2.0 is not a trend, a fashion, a gimmick, a moment in time.
The Web is here to stay and more people are on the Web every day.
Opening real one to one relationships with readers and consumers is the revolution that is shaking all mass media and the whole marketing universe.

Mass media and marketing know how to push.
They are just beginning to learn how to welcome.

Web 2.0 is just beginning.

David Carr:

How much more powerful is (…) networked intelligence than a reporter with a phone, a Rolodex and the space between his or her ears?

As the former newspaperman and Web evangelist Jeff Jarvis (…) has been saying since before broadband, the Web is not just a way to shout, it is a way to listen, one that can lead to deeper, more effective journalism.

Iain M. Banks:

Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a) that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b) just how to go about breaking the rules, and c) how to get away with it, whether the rule-breaking had led to a successful outcome or not. Matter

Kevin Kelly:

Payment is
1) A way of connecting.
2) A sign of approval.
3) A vote.
4) It indicates an allegiance with the maker.
5) It feels good to the payer, to support.
People buy stuff, but what we all crave are relationships. Payment is an elemental type of relationship.

Jeff Jarvis:

Connectivity is a platform for society.

Paul Bradshaw:

Now I’m not peddling that old cliché that “everyone is a journalist” – but rather arguing that the process of journalism itself is increasingly open to deconstruction: the tools of researching, recording, publishing and distribution can now be broken up and distributed between teams of organised readers.

W.L. Gore (via Jean Fahmy):

3. Everyone can lead
Without rank, it gives every employee the opportunity to be a leader.

As could be expected from the Boing Boing gang, they have come up with a new set of policies that we all can use as a model. Cory says:

Our insurance company asked us to come up with a bunch of policies — DMCA takedowns, privacy, etc — and set us off on a quest for some legalese that didn’t make us want to wash our eyes out with acid afterwards, but still passed muster with the lawyers. We worked long and hard and came up with some language we’re pretty happy with. Check it out.

if you run a non-commercial site, you can even copy these policies since they are under a Creative Common non-commercial license.
They also mention TRUSTe as a resource.

Mitch Joel:

Think about it – what if everything we knew about Marketing and Advertising until now really was just an anomaly, and the new ways that are spurting up as we Blog is the way things were meant to be?
Human beings are often great at being able to adapt as situations unfold, but I think there is an opportunity now to be magnificent. To really embrace a new way in which Consumers and Producers blur all the lines and write new rules together. And who knows, maybe what we’re really seeing with Social Media and Web 2.0 is how Marketing, Advertising and Communications was really meant to work… even as traditional agencies continue to clamp on to business as usual.

Tehanu:

I have yet to find a book that describes the rest of it– why user profiles are good to have, why you want to make user feedback very easy, why you want people to have a way to see how useful or popular their contributions are, strategies for handling moderation and user disagreements. I would pay for a digital or paper book version of essays such as these.

Kevin Kelly:

Answering real FAQs is smart for several reasons:
* It forces you to face the problem.
* It forces you to face your answer.
* It’s an opportunity to sell (yes).
* It projects your character and brand.
* You can control the answer.

Cheryl Barre:

If you think about the fact that industry sales are down this year, year to date, and when you think about fewer people being in- market, digital is even more important to be able to talk to those consumers who are in market.

Jeff Jarvis:

Do I trust you? The key is to make sure that I have control over my data.

Clay Shirky (via Jeff Atwood):

What we’ve got is a network that is natively good at group forming. In fact, this isn’t just a fifth revolution. It holds the contents of the previous revolutions, which is to say we can now distribute music and movies and conversations all in this medium. But the other thing it does is move us into a world of two-way groups. Thirty years from now, when I’m presenting this book, if I had to describe it in one bullet point — this is what the bullet point would say: Group Action Just Got Easier.

Roger Hobbs:

The Internet is not a separate place a person can go to from the real world. The Internet is the real world. Only faster.

In his new blog, Steph Lagrange reports a conversation we had last April about my work:

Proximity (i.e. “always available”) is another key concept to Bruno. Whereas in traditional media the distance between the ad and the store can be miles and/or days away, on the Web the distance has narrowed down to a mere hyperlink (i.e. URL). The call to action and the ability to take action are instantaneous, almost real time.

And this is exactly where most media companies miss the point. Too focused on page views and unique visitors to measure their online ad display revenue, media corporations miss the conversion to action stage.

To get your customer engaged enough to act upon an ad with the intent of following through, remains the biggest conversion whatever the media. And then, what happens?

Stephane is really impressive: there was a lot distractions around when we talked but he didn’t miss a beat and he summarizes this whole concept beautifully. Thanks!

Makes me wonder if I shouldn’t do like McLuhan: rather than spending months (years!) writing a book, I could just talk and collect the notes of people I am speaking with. :-)

People often ask me to describe the job of a moderator. Luckily for us, MetaFilter member SpacemanStix asked this question:

Dear mathowie, jessamyn, and cortex: how many hours do you commit to keeping MeFi afloat? Is it a huge time commitment, not a big deal, or somewhere in the middle? It seems like a lot to juggle between three people. True? And if so, what takes up most of your time?

The result is fantastic: a unique look at the work of moderators of one of the best and best managed communities on the Web. You can read the whole thread but I have excerpted here their main answers. I could have edited quotes and organized them by topic, but I think it’s great as is, an opportunity to learn how moderating works on a day to day basis.

mathowie is Matthew Haughey, creator of MetaFilter (or Mefi).
jessamyn is Jessamyn West, moderator of MetaFilter since 2005, especially in charge of Ask MetaFilter, or Askme.
cortex is Josh Millard, part-time moderator of MetaFilter since 2007.
pb is Paul Bausch, part-time Web developer for MetaFilter.
MetaTalk, or MeTa, is the part of MetaFilter where members and moderators talk about issues concerning the site.
MeMail is short for MetaFilter Mail, a messaging service for members.

mathowie:
I look at the website during all waking hours. I probably spend half my waking hours doing admin/mod stuff like checking new posts for spamminess, emailing people their forgotten usernames, tending the flag pile, etc.

A “flag” is the way members alert moderators of any problem or rule breaking. It’s the essential tool of moderation for any community. The “flag pile” or “flag queue” is the list of flags that appears on a moderator’s dashboard.

cortex:
I’ve heard Matt and Jess describe the job as great because you only have to work like ten or fifteen minutes out of the hour—but that goes for every waking hour of the day. Which is a pretty solid description.

Really, it’s pretty uneven. Some days I check in once every hour or half-hour or so and there’s just nothing to worry about — no new flags, metatalk is quiet, not much email coming in. Some days it’s heavier than heck and we end up deleting four threads and cleaning up after a pile of different messes in the green and the blue and fielding complaints or inquiries via the contact form and explaining admin reasoning over here. There’s no Normal Day, really, and what takes up most of my time is really a shifting aggregate.

cortex:
Spammer patrol tends to manifest in brief, bright flashes of pain: we spend ten or twenty minutes (give or take, depending on the cleverness of the spammer) digging to establish a connection, and then it’s delete and ban (or, sometimes, if things seem to check out despite pushing some buttons, shrug and keep an eye on).

It doesn’t usually take a whole lot of time to deal with the askme flag queue; barring a real mess of a question (hardly rare, but not a ten-a-day M-F occurrence), cleanup is usually quick enough. We need to check in often, though, and on a heavy week when everyone and their uncle is having a fuckaround on the green it can be a real pain in the ass to keep up with, but overall they’re still fairly self-contained make-it-better issues: you fix it and it’s done and that’s that. Unless someone posts a…

Metatalk thread. And a thread keeps going, and is explicitly interactive in a way that most admin stuff isn’t, and is really visible to boot, so it tends to require more attention over the long haul and require more patience to deal with folks being kind of publicly antagonistic — to us, to other users, etc — in a way that eats up a lot more energy and diplomatic capacity than discrete decide-and-fix stuff behind the scenes. Even email, where upset people sometimes are a lot more free with their invective or assertions than even an angry metatalk callout, are in a way a lot less trouble and stress because at least it’s just between us and whoever is writing, without a big audience along for the ride.

So…yeah. I love it to death, I think it’s a vital part of what makes Metafilter work, but I kind of have to agree with Jessamyn that Metatalk is also (if partly by necessity) kind of the daddy of administrative time/energy drains on a busy week.

jessamyn:
Those really long MeTa threads that happen? We read every comment. Around about comment 800 when someone says “Hey mods, what about THIS edge case?” we usually reply. AskMe is usually quick but constant, exactly like cortex said, and a lot of the rest of it is just sort of vigilance, being around to keep an eye on stuff that looks sketchy, investigate a self-linky looking thing and giving the other mods a heads up when stuff looks weird. We also do a lot of prosaic link/post/comment/typo correction and back and forth email/MeMail with users about various topics, to say nothing of just interacting with the site as regular old folk, to the extent that we can do that. People contact me via email, MeMail, chat, facebook, phone (rarely) and regular old f2f. We don’t have any form letters (except when we were doing the backtagging project) everything’s real communication.

Often the weirdest time-consumers are people who email and say “hey can you delete my comment in the tiger thread? I’ve rethought my position.” or something and then we have to track down who the user is by their email address, find out wtf thread they’re talking about and then what comment and then delete it, if we even can by that point. No real hassle, but multiply it by four or five in a busy day and there’s 20 minutes gone right there.

I know that I personally take a lot of responsibility for AskMe, so I try to at least read all the questions and also the comments in any thread that has a lot of activity or a lot of flags. I also post a lot of the sidebar mentions, keep track of favorite stuff for podcasts, and listen to Every Single Music Track. The podcast alone is a fair chunk of work, an hour or two to record and then mathowie spends some serious time editing and polishing it. I make sure the faq is up to date. We all beta test new feature ideas [usually] and bump bugs over to pb to wrassle with and there’s a lot of back and forth that happens doing this, like figuring out why some people were still getting the MeFi “massage” message well after the site was back up, or debugging the image uploader issues, post-upgrade.

We all spend a goodly amount of time also bringing each other up to date on what we’ve been up to. We can sort of follow each other’s admin trail but if something needs communicating we have a little back channel email about who is going to be offline when (outside of normal offline times) and what may need looking after if we’re tagging someone else in. I don’t know if I’d call it exactly a “huge” time commitment because with few exceptions we can fit it around other fun things and I think of huge committments as things that squeeze out what you’d rather be doing. I like doing this.

jessamyn:
Now is as good a time as any to mention something I’ve been wanting to say for a while. Because I work here, with my odd flexible schedule, and this huge crowd of bright and shiny nerds [and the rest of youse] it also lets me do the other things I do in my life like helping the little libraries of Central Vermont with their tech support issues, teaching email to old people, and travelling around the world teaching librarians why they shouldn’t be afraid of computers. This would literally be impossible if I had a “straight” job and unaffordable otherwise.

Add to this that I think AskMe is one of the best proof of concept reference-via-hive-mind sites out there and a terrific living, breathing example of how to expand our idea of “what a library does” to “what people can do, given some structure and guidance and community” and I just wake up pleased about it pretty much every day. We should all be so lucky. Matt really took all the risks and the early slogging to get this all going — at the ROFLcon panel someone asked him how long he did the site himself before it started making a profit and he was like “um, six years” and everyone laughed like hell because what sort of a business model is THAT — and cortex and I both feel enriched (if overtired sometimes) getting to help out and, with pb, helping shape the site moving forward.

All mass media would benefit from a community of their readers and most are strategically well placed to create one but most of them don’t seem to see why they should do it.

Jeff Jarvis writes today about Rupert Murdoch’s strategy to attack the New-York Times’ brand. Independently from the Times’ situation, Jarvis’ diagnostic could be applied to any mass media:

I think the Times has to decide on radical reinvention, a new architecture. You can guess my starting points: a networked structure, a distributed strategy, a community plan.

Jarvis also refers to suggestions he made last month to the Times, using a quote from Fred Wilson:

The Times should create and sell quality collaborative networks and expand the brand around its value: reporting. (…) And it has to become the product of collaboration with networks and independent professionals and its audience.

I agree with Fred Wilson here: “I’d make the NY Times all about their audience. Let the people who read the paper have a much larger role in the content that gets published, both online and offline. The best thing about the NY Times is their readers. The only way they can fix their problems is by leveraging them as the other half of their newsroom.”

The tone may sound apocalyptic, but creating a community is not such a gigantic enterprise: MetaFilter, for example, generates 9.9 millions page views per month and is managed by 4 people. In fact, considering the hardship of mass media on the Web, the cost of creating a community is minimal.

It looks like the cultural shift is all that is paralyzing our mass media.

It’s high season for community building.
People are asking “Build me a community” like they would ask “Draw me a lamb” or “Cook me a tuna casserole”.

But communities are not things that you can build away from people and then give away like a mass media or a chocolate bar.

Communities are not things, they are people who have a life and are members of a lot of communities at work, at play or according to their pleasure or their passion.

Brian Oberkirch talks about it in LikeItMatters:

Serve communities, don’t build them.

Find existing groups and add value to what they are trying to do. Participate. Host, if you must, but I bet groups are already helping themselves.

We don’t create communities on the Web: we welcome communities that already exist but don’t have yet a place to meet on the Internet. We can give them the magic of memory and asynchronism. They do the rest.

The always brilliant Mark Pesce just published That Business Conversation, the text of his latest speech.

The conclusion should be on the screen of every business leader.

The balance of power has shifted decisively into the hands of the networked public.

… unless you embrace conversation as the essential business practice of the 21st century, you will find someone else, more flexible and more open, stealing your business away.