It is 9 o'clock and the experiment is now running for nearly 12 hours
I went to sleep yesterday at 1 o clock in the morning. I discover couple of things this morning
1) all my questions aren't actually deleted from online debate and people are answering them. SO debateonline is back in the race
here is the list of the website I am using
1) answers.yahoo.com/
3) http://www.convinceme.net/
4) http://www.onlinedebate.net/
5) http://debatewise.com/
2) the evolution overnight is mitigated
On onlinedebate there is currently
>> 4 answers about boudicca. All of them are kind of jokes, ranging from free mason conspiracy to things with chuck Norris. The forum seems mainly American, this maybe why this very English topic does stick well. Also, as the first reply was a joke, the community members apparently fell obliged to keep the joke going.
>> 8 answers about the best football manager, some names are given but with very few reasons why. The discussion is mainy lead by two english people and some americans are doing jokes about british and soccer.
>> 5 answers about crowd sourcing: ranging from simply " no because it is the choice of the people" to "what is this word that i don't know"
>> 2 answers about WW2, mainly taking D day as the most important battle with couple of explanations why.
On yahoo answer
the overall quality is very good, succint and precise. Yet no evolution overnight as I guess the questions drawned in the abyss of the website very quickly
>> crowdsourcing: 0 answers
>> Stendec: 0 answers
>> Boudicca: 5 answer / 0 overnight
>> WW2: 7 answers / 0 overnight
>> Best football manager >> 2 answers, / 0 overnight
On convinceme
>> WW2: 4 answers / 2 overnight
>> Stendec: 0 answer
>> Boudicca: 0 answer
>> Football manager: 2 answers / 1 overnight
>> Corwdsourcing: 1 answer
Most of the answer are no longer than a phrase, only the WW2 question attracted a huge answer, nearly an article in fact
On debate wise
no sign of life whatsoever...
Conclusion
So far i consider Yahoo answer giving the best result for my purpose. The number of people answering is quite important, as long as subject is appealing. THis is maybe why the football manager question didn't work. this cross correlate to a cetain extend the Technorati study saying that bloggers were watching a lot less TV than the average person. Also he question is very specific.
Nevertheless it seems that touching the right people with the right questions is crucial to receive a quick and documented answer ( convinceme). In that case this happent by luck. If this could be done cleverly I am sure this would raise the level of the answers.
Regarding onlinedebate, the community aspect seems quite a barrier to my purpose as the penetration rate for newcomers is very weak and the existing users are there to be with each others rather than really answer questions.
Also, the "deleting question" reaction from the administrators, seems to be more of a defensive reaction against someone too expansive and looking like a thread of some sort, rather than a real care for quality of thoughts of the forum. Further researches shown that most of the questions/topic are very very weak in their arguments and potential for debate and my questions started discussion without needing any improvement.
The discursive aspect of a strong community is also most of the time leading to move from the initial subject to trivial remarks about the wife, the dog, the car or again jokes of some sorts.
Again, targeting the right people is what seems essential.
I decided to leave this experiment run for 12 more hours, thus ending around 8 tonight after 24 hours.
For the next ones I would like to
1) write about a "current affair" rather than history or personal opinion about a obscure subject.
2) go deeper in one of the current subject, by asking more specific questions. I think so fare the WW2 topic seems the most appropriate
I finally had the experiment running for 36h and here are the results
I asked questions on four websites, three of which were responsive
1) answers.yahoo.com/
3) http://www.convinceme.net/
4) http://www.onlinedebate.net/
On the five questions i asked one stayed totally unheard (what does stendec means ?) and another one (which is the most important battle of second world war ?) created real debates in all the responsive sites.
It became hard and irrelevant to count the number of answers after a while as a lot of them are either trivial, jokes or aknwoledging quotes from previous post. The discursive aspect was in a way beneficial as it kept the thread in the top positions in the forums, but mainly the biggest benefit was to oblige some contributors to build stronger arguments and, sometime, bring sources
Here are the amount of words I collected for each topics after these 36 hours
WW2: 2354 words
Crowdsourcing: 393 words
Bouddica: 196 words
Manager: 194 words
Stendec: 0 words
Total: 3137 words
I will now start editing the text to build articles I ll post on this blog. I guess the questions will still evolve in the meanwhile but for the purpose of this experiment I have the feeling that 36 hours is enought.
I also deceided, as the world war 2 topic seems very responsive to dig it with the same websites and in particular Yahoo answer. Because the others are forums of a smaller size I will need to be weary to not be seen as a spammer or trouble maker.
Interestingly this might shows that anonymous and uninteresting way of asking questions on the internet isn't a good pay off for my purpose
I thought it would be interresting to give here some data about the lenght of the average blog post.
This may help to compare the amount of data I collected to the average blogosphere.
According to the following figures I am not that badly served as i collected more than 10 times the lenght of the average blog post for the world war 2 questions.
The other questions are in the range of an average post lenght
Taking the Technorati Top 100 as my sample, eliminating those which aren't in the English language, and those which aren't identifiable as conventional blogs, I took an average word count of the 10 most recent posts on each blog.
The graph above shows the distribution of the average word count - the shortest average was a terse 77 words, and the longest a snooze-inducing 1,449. The vast majority of posts were over 100 words and under 500.
If we group the posts into distinct strata, we can see a clearer indication of the distribution:
Essentially, the distribution is a normal curve with positive skew - with half of all blogs having an average of 100-249 words per post.
Consistently shorter posts are rare - usually limited to blogs devoted to non-written content (pictures, videos, audio etc.), and with celebrity gossip blogs having a tendency to be more concise -Perez Hilton, for example.
On the other end of the spectrum, there's a distinct jump in word length for some blogs - in these cases it's usually a transition between writing for entertainment to writing for reference. With the transition comes the ability to post much longer articles, without the fear of losing interest. The articles over at A List Apart are a good example of this.
I just posted the last article. It took me about 2 hours in total to edit the 4 articles from the bits and pieces I collected on the 3 websites. I spent most of my time editing the one about second world war as it is the longest (about 3000 words). Nevertheless I mainly worked on articulating paragraph and didn t touch the body of the text that much. Strangely enough, people who were writing on different forums complement each others really well.
This may introduce the fact that multiplying the sources is beneficial to the overall body of work. just like writing a paper in a normal way.
It is a real sucess for a first trial I think as I spent maybe in total 5 hours working on these questions ( registration on all the website and learning how to use them included) and I managed to write 4 relatively OK articles.
In total they are more than 4000 words, so I "produced" around 1000 words an hour. Not bad.
Now i will focus on increasing the over quality of thoughts and the referencing. I m planning tomorrow to find forums specialized in certain subjects and ask a very precise question, sources included.
This will help, I hope, to prove that reaching the right people when asking a question on the internet is crucial to receive in return a high quality content and experience a high reactivity from the crowd.
It has been very exciting so far as most of my assumptions seem to be verified. Looking forward to the next round.
It has been about two weeks I didn’t do any other experiments due to work overload but I managed the last two days to do a new one which is pretty interesting.
Also I did film all my activities during the experiment so I will be able to post a video soon.
I bought the Financial Times from 1st of June and grabbed couple of articles. From the body of those articles I extracted material to build questions. These questions were a bit more documented than the ones from the former experiment.
Here they are:
Will MP’s expenses scandal influence the coming European elections?
The scandal continue to cause reactions as Alistair Darling, in charge of the UK’s finances seems to have claimed for six month the rent for a flat in south London while also claiming allowances for his free apartment in Downing street. With the European election coming, do you think this scandal will influence voters?
Cattle’s farming is destroying the rain forest in Brazil. How could we avoid that without damaging the Brazilian economy?
Cattle farming account for more than 7 billion dollar a year in Brazil’s exports. However, this practice is the most important cause of the tearing down of the rain forest. How could it be possible to solve this issue?
Is North Korea about to start World War 3 or is it only building tensions to attract attention toward itself?
Satellites spotted North Korean Long distance missile being transported by train this week. North Korea got a history of shifting equipment to attract attention and generate crisis, knowing that US spy satellites would detect those movement. However, North Korea fired last month a long-range missile over Japan. Where do you think this lead?
/
What would be the best strategy to end the war in a responsible way in Afganistan ?
Last month the Obama administration announced its new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A few days ago, Robert Gates, the defence secretary, said the US and its allies had a year in with to make meaningful progress. What these progresses should be?
Could teaching business be the solution to the 3rd world poverty issues ?
The French HEC management school is currently helping producers in Burkina Faso to become more business minded. If this measure was globalized, could it be the way for solving world’s poverty problems?
Instead of posting those questions in random/generic places like yahoo answer I looked after forums with focus into the questions. I failed to found a very relevant forum for the Brazilian cattle and teaching business in Africa.
Here are the forums/website I used from last time:
Yahoo answer
convinceme.net
Onlinedebate.com
And the new ones:
Politicalcrossfire.com
UKdebate.co.uk
debatepolitics.com
Politicsforum.co.uk
I was blocked by moderators on
forum.greenpeace.org
The reasons for this blocking are unknown on the Greenpeace forum. I suspect that they just dislike political subject and want to keep a very strict “editorial” line that is directed toward the image they re promoting.
Anyway, it took me hell of a lot of time to navigate, register and understand how all these different forums worked, as they are all different from each other’s. Also navigating in the maze of categories and subcategories was very confusing. It took me about 2 hours post these five questions on theses 8 platforms.
I left the experiment running for 36 hours. From midnight the 1st of June to midday the 3 rd of June and the results were amazing. I did gather 8 129 words of relevant data (I didn’t copy the one line comments and jokes) and a lot of link to very relevant documents and videos.
Afganistan >> 2732 words
North Korea >> 4099 words
MP’s expenses >> 653 words
Brazilian cattle >> 228 words
Business in Africa >> 417 words
Learning outcomes
1) The crow is extremely receptive to news related questions. The North Korea subject was just amazing, with more than 4000 words in 24 hours. This is great news for writingcloud as a way to engage with breaking news.
2) I learned from the first experiment that organisation of bookmark and text is key. Still this methodology is extremely time consuming as it took me nearly two hours ( from 12 to 2 o clock on the 3rd of June) to harvest the text posted by the crowd. This is just very inefficient and brings more validation to writingcloud.
3) When questions become more specific generic platforms yahoo answer become pretty useless. The age of the audience might also be a reason why more political questions didn’t work well in yahoo answer.
4) Finding the right people that will engage with the subject is very important. For instance, The MP’s expenses attracted very few reactions from American forum and very few people were interested in the cattle farming in Brazil
I will now edit the texts and post them to the blog.
Posts
