Disqus - Latest Comments for Laura Hale

Re: Kaplak and The Wiki Way

Laura Hale — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:15:12 -0000

Really enjoyed this. As some one who does a lot of wiki stuff, I can relate on the blogging thing. It feels like something that you need to do immediately where you should not go more than a few days with out updating your blog. Wikis have much less pressure, or a different kind of pressure to get the right people involved with the project.

Re: Kaplak and The Wiki Way

Laura Hale — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:53:02 -0000

Fan History is trying to get venture capital and is in a similar position. We want to do other things related to that but the wiki is core to our business plan. The wiki has the potential, especially as our traffic increases, to change potential power dynamics in other spaces because of the information that people can gather. We've already seen this start to happen.

Your post mentioned lack of pressure to pump out content quickly. I don't know that I agree with that but it might come down to what your wiki's topic is. Fan History is more entertainment driven, with components of web 2.0 news and fandom news. There is, to a certain extent, a rush to be timely but the pressure is less because while it might be important to get an article up about LiveJournal elections, a policy change at Quizilla which might cause parts of fandom to desert it or the Open Source Boob project, we can quickly create a stub, adding minimal information and then capture that audience who will hopefully help contribute to that information. Or we can give ourselves time to go back and edit that content when we are less pressed for time or have fewer commitments we need to worry about. That, for me, is the real advantage.

Have you looked at some extensions for MediaWiki like the ability to integrate a blogging component and socialprofiles into your wiki? Or looked at WetPaint's platform which allows commenting on articles? There are a few wikis that seem to use those as a way to foster user engagement. Halopedia takes this to an extreme of sorts with out necessarily losing the wiki way. (But that might come down to defining what the wiki way means for you. For us at Fan History, that tends to be eschewing the idea of community in order to insure that we can minimize the perception of bias that fostering a community can create.)

Twitter vs. Friendfeed probably matters most if your target audience is in that space. :) So seeing something more relevant to my activities is a YAY! :)

Re: Kaplak and The Wiki Way

Laura Hale — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:33:31 -0000

Fan History right now really needs some funding to hire a few people, improve our back end, get some programming work done and improve our marketing. You can only push the base script so far before you run into the scalability issues and the lack of content can be a major hindrance to growth.

How tied is Kaplak with academic and academic theory regarding community organization and function? There is a lot of language created and in use already. I know this has become an issue with Fan History in that we've got a number of potential audiences who don't speak the same language and don't really have a need to speak the same language. (Acafen, Quizilla users, members of the entertainment industry all create their own language based on need and interest.)

Stub advantage. :) But very important. I know for Fan History that we've found say using a template like musicians template as a base for articles means that new users are less intimidated when they see an article like Oasis. It ups our participation level. I've chatted with a lot of people who see wiki entries on Wikipedia, see the articles as rather complete and don't feel they can make meaningful contributions with out some structure where they can easily plug in.

Sounds like a nifty extension. :) And I could see the advantages to having that integrated in.

Re: Kaplak and The Wiki Way

Laura Hale — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:03:09 -0000

Ah. The investment language gap in terms of understanding a wiki and the power of a wiki. I could see why the need to have shared terminology would be important there. And having shared language and teaching a customer base understand what a wiki is and how to use it. (The second one is more of a problem I can understand. ) I have only started to put together a business plan and think about who to contact so not familiar with the business end of problems. If you've got a good network and good contacts, that can be half the battle.

Wikipedia has a lot of issues. Some of those templates are so complex that I find them scary to edit. The notability requirement, the people sitting on articles to revert anything that doesn't match with their idea of what should be in the article are among some of the problems. Sadly, Wikipedia's visibility is what a lot of people think of when you talk about wikis and getting people from other wikis to be involved in the larger wiki community can be a pain in the arse.

I installed GTalk where I'm laura @ fanhistory . com. I'm on AIM at h2oequalswater, MSN at lhale@niu.edu, and Y!M at bouncingpurplepopple.

Re: Kaplak and The Wiki Way

Laura Hale — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:10:09 -0000

Creating and explaining the usefulness issue is one thing that we're pretty good with. (And it is at the heart of our business plan.) We've highlighted that and when I talk to people who might possibly contribute, I point out all the ways that by contributing, they can be served. If you're a fan fiction writer, there are ideas on how to promote yourself in the wiki. It can help to expand your audience, centralize your information and make it more searchable and provide a resource to inform readers who want to know the status of your work who might do that by googling you. If you are a dealer at conventions, use the dealer template to create an article about yourself. For dealers, it puts all the information in a central location, it is easy to update, requires almost no overhead and improves on the existing resource of convention pages which frequently do not contain updated lists of dealers. I could probably think of another four or five examples of usefuless. For us, the usefulness aspect becomes really obvious really fast. (And I love to discuss that.) It is one of the reasons why I really feel like we have a lot of potential.

It is more of a learning how to wiki code and having people to support new contributors with out offending them. Going back to Wikipedia, people can get really frustrated. They're bold, they edit and then some one comes in and basically destroys their contributions. It makes them less inclined to participate again. They might still use the wiki as a tool because they can't get that information elsewhere but they might not be willing to contribute.

And added to this, fandom, like pretty much any other type of social grouping, has a whole slew of politics going on, competing groups, factions, vested interests in how things are portrayed. This can be a barrier, a bigger barrier, than the perceived usefulness. "Yes, this is a great resource BUT I don't agree with the politics of the person who runs it. I won't contribute." OR "I don't like the fact that anyone can edit it. I'd like the tool better if it had better controls and only a limited number of people could contribute to it."

I think that we both probably have similar issues but because our audience have different concerns and different needs that our barriers to getting people to edit are very different. (But that we both have the same end goal of getting greater user contributions.)

Re: Kaplak and The Wiki Way

Laura Hale — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:26:44 -0000

There are a number of extensions for MediaWiki that allow tagging. The usefulness of tagging in a wiki probably comes down to the purpose of the wiki, the audience for the content, and how married contributors are to the category system.

Re: Kaplak and The Wiki Way

Laura Hale — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:03:15 -0000

Thanks. We really try. :)

Re: Why We Don’t Really Like Social Networks

Laura Hale — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:46:44 -0000

"This is why I love wikis, why I love decentralized structures and p2p-based architectures,"

Ditto. Going back to your science fiction writer, if there was an article about him on a wiki and he wanted to offer better category options, it becomes really easy to do. He can simply add say [[Category:Retired science fiction writers]] to the article. Then he can look at the category structure, see where that would fit in to that and add say [[Category:Science fiction writers]] or [[Category:People who have retired]] or [[Category:Professional authors]] to link it back into the categorization tree. If it doesn't look obvious, he can always use a number of talk pages or contact an admin to see how to do to better integrate that category in to the wiki.

Wikis can be amazingly flexible in that regard and there is very little overhead from a development stance for making changes such as those. The cost is at the community level and having people who have the job of interacting with people be the ones who can make that change helps to foster relationships. There aren't as many complex levels which can make communication across levels more arduous.

Re: How Spam Blogs Cheat Technorati

Laura Hale — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:47:04 -0000

I don't suppose you could do a follow up to this article? I was viewing things on a Technorati RSS feed and stumbled across http://technorati.com/blogs/rivabilliewke.achte... which basically is all scraped content linked to by other scraped blogs. Is Technorati doing anything about this and is there a way to report a scraper domain to Technorati?

Re: Stupid Plagiarist Tricks

Laura Hale — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:34:47 -0000

I don't know if it falls into the category of stupid plagiarist or brilliant plagiarist as the author eventually used her plagiarized works in order to get a book deal... http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Cassandra_Claire... has most of the details. There were all sorts of excuses for the plagiarism when it was discovered, including that she was playing a game of spot the quote with her readers, that she had always footnoted the references (which she had never done that completely), that she had permission from the author (which she got before or after the plagiarism actually happened and depended on the telling) and that because it wasn't fan fiction, the plagiarism didn't count. The author in question was a journalist which explains that last defense. She was also supported by Internet (real life too) lawyer who specialized in entertainment law who said it wasn't plagiarism and threatened to sue people who implied that. (So it wasn't a surprise later when her lawyer was revealed to be a plagiarist. She defended herself as having done a pastiche.) The author then cribbed passages from her fan fiction verbatim into her professional works. So yeah, not sure if it is a case of stupid or brilliant because she helped use this all to help get herself that book deal.

Re: I am Hyper Connected

Laura Hale — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:24:13 -0000

in the comments of the Kaplak blog and there is a certain freedom to interacting with fandom this way. It also means that I can blog at my own leisure. I can rely on others to help provide content. My tasks thus descend to getting my startup off the ground by getting funding by doing the marketing work, networking work, being connected with the backend developer and finding people to get involved with. My other task is to generally keep informed. (But the whole startup part means I have less time to just delve into what I love because I can't spend two weeks obsessing over writing a 45,000 word document on subject of interest.) So yeah, similar issues but more free than you because of the wiki format.

Re: Fandom and traffic

Laura Hale — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:27:12 -0000

There are certain contexts where you can insert links if they provide factual information. It really depends on the content you are linking to and depends on how obnoxious you are about inserting links. I've seen plenty of instances where the minor fansites are included because there are so few or they are one of the few reliable sites for information.

Re: Fan History’s search

Laura Hale — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:43:34 -0000

"When you consider replacement search functionality, remember your site’s very private statistics are a critical component of this decision."

I thought about that, which was one of the reasons seeing people's searches was turned off. This is ultimately just a short term solution for us while we wait for our lucene engine to be fully functional and our site's internal search to be functional.

Re: Power in fandom

Laura Hale — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:03:21 -0000

Fandom has a lot of students in it on a variety of level. That particular group can be more or less aware of the power structure and what it means to them. If you're in certain circles, it just isn't relevant because WHO CARES as long as you get what you want out of it... and if one service isn't, you can always go elsewhere.

That said, I don't think that people's need to work necessarily changes their type of engagement. I know plenty of people who work full time and are involved in fandom all across the economic ladder and age level.

Re: Chicago area new media events

Laura Hale — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:15:59 -0000

Will totally be there. I really enjoyed the last one.

Re: Got Readers? A Guide to Gaining Popularity for Your Fan Fiction

Laura Hale — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:59:46 -0000

FanLib shut down in early August.

Re: CSI fandom, canon and me

Laura Hale — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:02:58 -0000

I'm sure that the season premiere will be kind of stressful. Sara coming back... Dealing with Warrick's death. Grissom's departure might be bother me a bit but probably in connection with Sara.

I wish there were more characters I could relate to on the show but Catherine's experiences are not ones I can relate to. Her bitchy attitude at time doesn't endear me to her. Greg is interesting but he always feels like a side story, not ready for prime time, following the show because of his character.

We'll have to see how they handle the new characters.

Re: Fan History Wiki: Content generation and finding the right format

Laura Hale — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:38:44 -0000

The thing about wikis is that they aren't really ... you can't really use a wiki to interview some one. If you do, you really need to lock the article in order to preserve the integrity of the wiki.

We've done a fair amount of inviting. Parts of the fan community aren't necessarily comfortable editing a wiki because of privacy concerns, lack of knowledge about how to edit, etd. So inviting them isn't always successful. :/ But we've found a number of people that way who have done some truly fantastic edits. :)

Re: Baseball season is over…

Laura Hale — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:47:49 -0000

Sure. There might be the Red Sox if you're from... I don't know... Boston but seeing as I'm not from the Boston area and I have an irrational love of Chicago area sports teams, the BoSox are not a real option.

Re: AOL’s personal web pages are going, going and almost gone!

Laura Hale — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:50:11 -0000

I posted to a couple of mailing lists. Seriously, some of these sites really need to be preserved. There is just the whole question of getting permission, etc. It can't really be done in a timely manner. :( Really wish there could be some organized method to do that.

Re: Looking for a new home.

Laura Hale — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:11:19 -0000

Considering there is a lot of speculation regarding the future of a number of sites, free solutions don't seem the most reliable. Going with your own is probably the best bet.

Re: Status updates on common requests and issues

Laura Hale — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 07:32:03 -0000

The celebrity thing is probably my biggest issue. It suggests Guy Kawasaki for me but I haven't followed him for a reason: Content not relevant to my interests and low chance of interaction if I reply. I'd kind of prefer something which weights the value of those on my twitter follow list who have fewer followers but where they and others have a low number of followers with 2 or 3 people in common. That is where I am mostly likely to know some one and not realize it, where I am likely to find some one with which I can have meaningful Twitter interactions.

Some one who is following 2,000 people? As a non-power user of twitter, that isn't as helpful or as interesting to me. Relationship development is key. You can't necessarily do that with some one following that many people. (Er. See http://blog.fanhistory.com/?p=120 for more of an explanation as to my issues.)

Re: 2008/05/21/gsp-east-contest/

Laura Hale — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:15:45 -0000

My favorite social application is LiveJournal. It offers a number of features that are specific to my interest and needs:

1. Easy to promote my projects in a cost effective (re:Free) way where I can improve my search engine optimization and gain a fair amount of traffic if I post to the right community. Both of these are things that MySpace, FaceBook, bebo, orkut and twitter don't really offer.

2. It caters to my interests. I can find CSI news, science fiction authors, communities for home brew and have that information appear along side other content or filter it out to chose what streams I want. I don't have to go to specifically taylored communities like other social networking sites and tools.

3. The ability to make my LiveJournal friends list into an RSS feed reader. Mashable, blogherald, I can add those RSS feeds to it, filter them and chose to read them how I want. I can check them all on one page.

4. Customization. That's one of the things I don't like about FaceBook and some new applications I've seen. I can't customize the look and feel of that space, nor really change things on MySpace. (Or I'm stuck viewing other people's customized pages to read their content in a way that doesn't appeal to me.) LiveJournal allows that customization for the look and it can carry over to other people's profiles.

5. Integrated subscription service. If there is a good post, I can subscribe to it and have those comments sent to my e-mail.

6. Third party search tools. I spend a lot of time looking around communities on Quizilla, FaceBook, orkut, MySpace. They have a lot of interactive content but the top level message boards aren't searchable in a way that means I can track references to my own projects. (MySpace picks up on paid ads in their searches which means I'm finding content that I may not want.) LJSearch's third party application, the presence of many feeds on various RSS search aggregators thus makes it appealing and easy to track my interests.

7. Finding like minded people and then being able to access their relevant content. For FaceBook, I have to deal with a lot of non-relevant content that isn't easy to filter out. (I don't want to read about who you added to your friends.) For Wordpress, you can read other people's content but it doesn't always feel as natural and fluid as LiveJournal makes its.

8. LJ-Toys, a tracking service for LiveJournal. Sort of like feedburner but it makes it easy to really see who is reading you and how many times.

9. Willingness of LiveJournal/SixApart/SUP to help integrate new technologies into posting. YouTube, Flickr, you get a popular application and LiveJournal makes sure that you can have it integrated on your site.

10. Limiting your readership through FLocks and filter. It is nice to have a feeling of control over who reads your content.

There are more reasons why I love this social networking platform. Those reasons and the ones listed above are why I continue to stick with it, even as things have changed.

Re: 2008/05/30/twitter-townhall/

Laura Hale — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:46:42 -0000

Can you offer the townhall to LiveJournal? They need it too.

Re: 2009/01/11/tech-twitter/

Laura Hale — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:41:33 -0000

Ditto on a lot of the other comments. I think Mashable has covered Twitter a bit too much, to the point where other interesting tech news has probably been ignored. It would be great to hear about other start ups, about lay offs, about new trends, etc. Twitter is great but the signal to noise ratio on the service is getting annoying to the point where I don't care to hear as much about it. (Even as I want to talk about it myself.) Unless there is something new to cover, give Twitter a pass.

Re: 2009/01/12/tweetsuite/

Laura Hale — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:31:38 -0000

What are the copyright implications regarding this service? Does Twitter's ToS allow what could be amounted to content scraping with out the consent of the author involved?

Re: Wikia Kills its Google Killer

Laura Hale — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:43:40 -0000

Mahalo, according to Jason's own admission, is less human powered and more "Paid contributor driven" so as to prevent gaming the system. If you run certain types of sites, it means that you're more likely to be left out as more trusted sources are plastered all over the place. (It often feels like Mahalo's pages could just be renamed as "Aggregators of Wikipedia, and IMDB.") Smaller sites are sort of locked out because Jason wants to prevent SEO folks from gaming the system. That's great but it also means lots of legitimate content gets excluded. And even if you're listed, it doesn't help smaller sites much at all in terms of visibility, exposure and traffic.

Mahalo is less of a search engine and more of a potential Wikipedia competitor. It does more than aggregate selected links like DMOZ. It provides a lot of information in the sidebar. It organizes information that really is kind of interesting. It has the potential to do more than it is just with how it is laid out.

I'm just not certain how well that will ultimately work out because when you are relying on paid contributors, not giving your visitors any real investment in your core product, making it difficult for small businesses to use your site to help them, meh. I'm just cynical. :/ I've yet to find a reason to use Mahalo for search because none of the content I want to search for is searchable there.

*babbles*

Re: Networking and numbers

Laura Hale — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:27:06 -0000

I tend to agree with the idea that it is very much the quality of your network over the numbers. I have a small twitter follow list of about 250. (With 290 or so following me.) I don't really want to grow it more than that as I don't feel like I could manage that and maintain the relationships on Twitter that I have if had more people I followed... and as Twitter is about maintaining and creating relationships for me, I know that the ball would drop if I had 500 followers.

There just seems to be a degree of Twitter guilt when people follow me and I don't follow them back. It is awesome that you followed me weather guy from New Mexico because I followed another weather guy from Chicago but I don't care about weather in New Mexico. Yet I see so many people automatically follow those, people obsessed with number of followers in some circles, asking their followers to help others on their follow list reach a new plateau for followers. There are just people who focus on the metrics rather than on relationships... and when that metric is heralded above all others, when you see RT of the same cohort of people who are unlikely to ever add value to your relationships? Blah. I had to remove some of those power twitter folks from my follow list because they weren't adding what I perceived as value while they created a huge amount of noise that made it harder to find that content.

I'd love to see a new Twitter Grader type tool that actually talked about relationships. Have it say require a minimum of 50 followers. From there, rank based on the amount of replies... where you want more of your network to reply to you with you replying to your network with the ideal of being 1:1. So if you have 1,000 people you follow where you've replied to only 5 people and 500 have replied to you, your ranking gets punished. If you have 100 followers and you've replied to them all and they've all replied to you but you have a case where 10 of those you've had extended discussions with where you had 100 replies each way and the rest of your network is stuck at 1 reply each week, you also get punished grading wise but not as much as others who have a ratio of less than 1:1. That would provide a much more meaningful number, de-emphasize the race for numbers and show people where you can develop relationships with and where those relationships can and do pay off. And for a lot more people on Twitter, THAT would be a much more meaningful metric because Jason Calacanis and Guy Kawasaki are unlikely to help most people who want their assistance.