The latest from TechCrunch
- Quora Backlash Slams Head First Into Quora Backlash Backlash
- Quora Is Really About A Better Wikipedia, Not Robert Scoble's Hopes & Dreams
- Bill Keller vs Wikileaks: Goodnight, Julian Assange, And Bad Luck
| Quora Backlash Slams Head First Into Quora Backlash Backlash | Top |
| You know how I know Quora is going to be big? No one can shut up about it. That includes both people who love it and people who hate it. And that dichotomy is important, because it will keep people talking about it. And that will keep people signing up. And it will keep those that already signed up going back. And that’s important because Quora is a service that takes a bit longer than others to get into. Anyway, the past couple of weekends have brought some truly great bitchmemes about Quora. Last weekend, it was Vivek Wadhwa who kicked things off on this very blog with his post, Why I Don’t Buy The Quora Hype . That post led to a firestorm of reactions (both positive and negative) in both the comments section and on Twitter. In fact, at one point after the post went up last weekend, I swear my entire tweet feed was devoted to it. And then came the blog posts in reaction to it. Thoughts on personal blogs also quickly jumped over to TechCrunch . God I love bitchmemes. But this weekend kicked things up another notch. And naturally, it was Robert Scoble who was the catalyst. Scoble wrote a post today entitled, Why I was wrong about Quora as a blogging service … If you haven’t read it yet, you should, if only to get context for Dan Kaplan’s hilarious rebuttal . Whereas Wadhwa brought up a number of good points in his post, Scoble just seems to be venting by arguing against his own initial argument. If you don’t want to read it, basically, it boils down to: it’s annoying that a moderator buried the answer I took a lot of time crafting. On one hand, that’s humorous. On the other, it’s also really the heart of the problem here. Quora is not a blogging platform. Initially, I agreed with some of Scoble’s original thoughts on the matter. But I apparently misinterpreted them to mean that he felt Quora was a part of the next progression of the overall blogging ecosystem . I still think it is . Quora is a great source of information like Twitter and Facebook and blogs themselves. But apparently, Scoble was actually just thinking that Quora was the actual future of blogging. As in, you would and should do it there. That’s just silly . To me, Quora is first and foremost about information. It’s about getting it out of peoples’ heads and into a centralized repository that, when mixed with certain social signals, becomes a blooming flower of knowledge. While I do think there is room for opinions on the service (and in many cases, that’s what is specifically being asked for), it’s not for users to go on and on in a highly personal and oddly promotional manner. Which is exactly what Scoble did in his down-voted posting in question (as Kaplan rightly calls out). Doing that is fine — on your own blog. In fact, it’s perfect for that. But if you put that type of stuff on Quora and expect it to be treated as the most authoritative answer simply because a certain percentage of your 8,000 followers will vote it up, you’re missing the point of Quora. It’s more about the information and less about the person providing the information. That’s simply one of the signals (albeit the most important initial one) to know if the information is any good or not. Should Scoble’s answer have been hidden? Probably not. And it actually doesn’t look like it is anymore. But because he has so many followers voting up his answer, it does overshadows the others in the thread, which are also good and much more to the point. Perhaps hiding Scoble’s was the way the moderator(s) thought would best ensure that other answers could be seen. Who knows. And really, who cares? Well, besides Scoble, of course. Again, Quora is not a blogging platform. And it never was. To get angry when you disprove your own misinterpretation is just weird. The real key here is that everyone can’t stop talking about Quora — no matter the reason. And at a very fundamental level, that means something. Something important. Something that other services that have caught on have shared. On a much less fundmental level, it means a shitload of press. And press about Quora press. And now even press about press about Quora press. Despite what you’ll read in the comments below (if you dare go down there), it’s the kind of press you can’t buy. It’s the kind that comes about naturally because people are interested in your site. Both people who want to write about it, and people who want to read about it. That is, when they’re not busy using it. [image: Walt Disney Pictures] CrunchBase Information Quora Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Quora Is Really About A Better Wikipedia, Not Robert Scoble's Hopes & Dreams | Top |
| Robert Scobleized Quora today. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I mentioned super-blogger Robert Scoble’s penchant for taking very strong positions on technology and startups and then reversing those decisions completely on a whim. I love him for his quick retreats. And I certainly admire a man who’s willing to rethink his opinion after weighing new evidence. But that’s not what Scoble did when he trashed Quora earlier today. He decided that Quora was a blogging service, or some kind of Friendfeed or Twitter-like place for conversations. And when he realized that it doesn’t do those things very well, he lashed out. Basically, he got mad that people downvoted his stuff. “It's a horrid service for blogging,” says Scoble. Yup. I agree. Quora isn’t a very good place for blogging. Because other people can edit or remove your stuff. It’s the sort of place where you have to behave yourself if you want to be heard. That’s exactly not blogging. The thing is, most of us have always known that. Quora is ostensibly a Q&A site. But that’s like saying a car is a device for burning gasoline. Or, in Robert’s case, he’s mad that his car won’t cook him dinner. When you think of Quora, think about Wikipedia, not Twitter or FriendFeed or a blog. It is a knowledge base. It says so right on the about page . Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: “Oh, great! That’s going to have all the information I want about that.” It’s also a place where new stuff–that no one has written about yet–can get pulled onto the web. Accumulating Knowledge People use Quora to document the world around them. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know is available in the system. When knowledge is put into Quora, it is there forever to be shared with anyone in the future who is interested. When I read “Over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know is available in the system.” I definitely think of Wikipedia. And I definitely don’t think of a clean, well lighted place for Robert Scoble to have conversations with his followers. Like Wikipedia, Quora can be a horrid place to voice an opinion. The community (led by Quora’s moderators) want a certain type of content. Stuff that isn’t about wit and rhetoric, but about getting experts to talk about things that they deeply understand. And since Quora bought the domain name and put up the site, they get to do that. Even if Scoble gets pissy about it. CrunchBase Information Quora Robert Scoble Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Bill Keller vs Wikileaks: Goodnight, Julian Assange, And Bad Luck | Top |
| I'm loathe to write again about Wikileaks, or about its pig-to-man founder, Julian Assange. Not because I've run out of things to say, but because the response is so predictable when I do. Within minutes, the Assange fanboys – the Wikiliebers, if you like – will swarm into the comments, accusing me of unfairly slandering their hero. "He's sticking it to The Man!" they’ll cry, "he's disrupting the mainstream media!" they’ll holler, "it was a honeytrap!" they’ll protest, until inevitably someone will accuse me of being in the pay of the US government and the whole thing will descend into farce. No forest of Vanity Fair and New Yorker profiles or unrelated criminal allegations or hubristic statements about having " two wars I have to end " will convince the Wikiliebers of the truth: that Assange is an arrogant computer genius who began Wikileaks with the best of intentions but has since lost sight of his principles in the relentless pursuit of personal celebrity. (I say that like it's a bad thing) But if I take some flak for my relatively inconsequential badgering of Assange, I can only imagine how much Bill Keller must be getting right now. After all, Bill Keller is the man who is about to put Wikileaks out of business once and for all. Keller, for the benefit of media non-nerds, is the executive editor of the New York Times . He is also a former Pulitzer prize winning journalist and the poor bastard who oversaw the paper's relationship with Assange and Wikileaks. He also wrote the brilliant introduction to the Times' very first ebook: ‘ Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomac y’ (Kindle, iBooks, Nook) which takes all of the newspaper’s Wikileaks coverage – the reporting, the analysis and the comment columns – and serves it all up as one giant, yet somehow entirely manageable banquet. For me – and I suspect for many TechCrunch readers – one of the more interesting parts of the book concerns the fight between China vs Google . Perhaps I hadn't been paying proper attention but I'd always understood the animosity between Beijing and Mountain View to be the result of Google's unwillingness to censor its search results to the satisfaction of the Chinese Politburo , or the fact that Gmail was routinely being used by anti-government dissidents. Not so, says the Times . In fact the root cause of the falling out apparently came when Li Changchun , China’s propaganda chief, learned how to Google himself. What he discovered – a torrent of abuse about himself and his family – made him so angry that he personally oversaw an unprecedented, and sustained, campaign of cyber-warfare against the search giant. In addition to the hacking, Li went after Google's financial interests, ordering three Chinese telecoms giant to sever their commercial ties with the company. I thought I was harsh on trolls. I got nothin' on Mr Li. The section also covers Beijing's other electronic battles against America; battles which range from the laughably ineffective to the laughably effective. On one occasion, we're told, the Chinese "patriotic hackers" used a Trojan horse document titled "salary increase – survey and forecast" to steal 50mb of data including all of the usernames and passwords from one unnamed US government agency. We’re also told that the Chinese government believes the Internet to be “fundamentally controllable”. That view might sounds ridiculous to us in the West but, as we’ve seen in Egypt this week, China isn’t the only government to hold it. The China revelations, though, form just one small part of what is a remarkable compendium of journalism: a collection of reporting and writing that's well worth the $6 asking price, even if the bulk of the material has already appeared in print. Just as Times ' reporters were able to sift through hundreds of thousands of raw cable and war logs and filter them down into headlines suitable for the masses, so Open Secrets filters that reporting down still further. In one long sitting a reader could go from knowing nothing about the Wikileaks saga knowing it all. No matter which side of the "Wikileaks: Good or Evil ?" debate you're on, the book will likely offer you some comfort. Those of us who worried that Wikileaks would cause a breakdown in relations between American diplomats and the rest of the world are told – in essence – to stop being so silly. In his introduction, Keller quotes Defense Secretary Robert Gates' reminder that foreign diplomats "cooperate not because they necessarily love us or trust us to keep their secrets… but because they need us". Wikileaks won’t change that fact. Meanwhile Scott Shane's essay "Can the Government Keep a Secret?" reassures us that the Wikileaks scandal has resulted in a lock down of low-level communications: USB ports have been cemented up, read/write access to Department of Defense computers has been restricted: in short everything that should have been done years ago to foil low-level leakers like Bradley Manning has finally been done. Thanks Julian! The Wikileaks supporters are thrown a few bones too. For a start, the Times stands firmly by its decision to publish the documents (much to the frothing anger of Michael Goodwin in the New York Post who describes the book as a "sloppy defence of Wikileaks… and Julian Assange, the anti-American anarchist behind WikiLeaks"). And to those who would try to downplay the value of the information in the leaks, the Times replies "that's not the point". The "immense value", Keller argues, is not that Wikileaks exposed major secrets (of the 251,287 documents, only 11,000 were marked secret, and none were classified top secret) but rather that "they provide texture, nuance and drama. They deepen and correct your understanding of how things unfold, they raise or lower your estimation of world leaders". Finally, those concerned about American hegemony in world affairs will be reassured to learn that its diplomats are far from all-powerful. In fact they seems to spend much of their time making concessions to avoid further inflaming anti-American sentiment around the globe. But then again, that might be the opposite of what Assange's supporters want to hear. After all, further inflaming anti-American sentiment around the globe is basically Wikileaks' mission statement. Suggesting that the organisation has achieved exactly the opposite is unlikely to win Keller any friends amongst Assange's supporters. But that's last point is kind of moot because most Assange fanboys will have been unable to get beyond the description, early in Keller's intro, of Assange as "arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous". In fact the sound you hear is a million Wikiliebers throwing down their Kindles and storming off to their rooms in a sulk. Which is a shame, because after that line, Keller really gets stuck in: describing how, when the Times refused to link its online coverage to the Wikileaks website (because Assange failed to keep his promise to redact the names of civilians) Assange flew into a rage, yelling "where's the respect?" And how, when the paper printed unflattering profiles of both himself and self-alleged Wikileaker, Bradley Manning, Assange demanded a front page apology from the Times and ordered the UK's Guardian newspaper to stop sharing information with Keller's team. The Guardian ignored the demand, not least because it soon emerged that Assange had been secretly sharing his documents with rival news organisations and reporters. What happened next was well covered by Sarah Ellison’s Vanity Fair piece – the headline, though, is this: Wikileaks founder threatens to sue newspaper in order to keep documents secret. The creatures outside looked from Assange to The Man, and from The Man to Assange, and from Assange to The Man again… And yet, and yet… none of the above is why Bill Keller is going to bring down Wikileaks. As with the leaks themselves, there's very little in Open Secrets that we didn't already know. American diplomats sometimes lie. Jullian Assange is a dick. Bears shit in the woods. No, it's not what the book says that will destroy Wikileaks, but rather what it represents . Every single page of Open Secrets reminds us of how much value professional journalists bring to the table, and how little is offered by Wikileaks and Assange. You could read through the raw cables between now and doomsday, but without the Times ' curation and independent reporting to make sense of it all, you might as well be a dog flicking through a book of Magic Eye pictures. That was, of course, precisely reason why Assange – prompted by the Guardian 's Nick Davies – formed a partnership between Wikileaks and the mainstream media in the first place. The former provided the raw data and the latter sifted, curated and investigated it. And yet, Keller takes pains to insist that at no point did the Times regard Assange as a partner. Rather he was treated as a source, pure and simple – no more or less important than anyone else who has offered the paper information, although certainly more annoying. That point is further driven home by the inclusion in the book of a profile of alleged leaker Bradley Manning which follows directly after Assange's profile. It's Manning, we're reminded, who – for good or ill – took the bulk of the risk in leaking the documents, finally ending up in Quantico for his apparent sins. For all Assange’s bombast, and the distracting sideshow of his impending (and unrelated) extradition hearing – Wikileaks is shown as little more than a geeky middleman whose one value-add was a promise to keep leakers' identities safe (again: Manning ended up in Quantico ) In fact, reaching the end of Open Secrets , you're left wondering why Wikileaks is needed at all. Assange’s only contribution to the process seems to have been to decree which newspapers could publish what documents – and when, and then threatening to sue when they refuse to show him "the respect". If anything, the book offers a comprehensive and compelling set of reasons why, far from being a disruptor, Wikileaks is itself ripe to be disrupted. And sure enough, that potential disruption is starting to emerge from a number of directions. First there’s Openleaks , the rival site launched this week by former Wikileaks operatives after they became disillusioned with Assange's management style. Unlike Wikileaks, Openleaks won't publish or control documents itself. Instead it will simply act as a conduit: blindly distributing leaked material to a wide range of media outlets, charities and special interest groups, while protecting the identity of the leaker. You know, like Wikileaks was supposed to do. Ironically, though, it's possible that Wikileaks’ most disruptive rival could come from the mainstream media itself, perhaps in the form of Bill Keller’s New York Times . Openleaks’ big promise is that, like Wikileaks, it distribute leaks widely so as to avoid the biases inherent with leaking to a single publication. But that overlooks the fact that many leakers are driven by political and ideological biases of their own. Bradley Manning certainly was, and maybe had he been able to anonymously leak his cache of documents to a like-minded publication able to provide the psychological and legal support he so obviously needed post-leak, there's a chance he would have taken that route as opposed to using Wikileaks. We'll never know. But next time we will. No sooner had Open Secrets hit the virtual shelves than Keller confirmed in an interview with Howard Kurtz at the Daily Beast that the Times has been working on exactly that kind of secure drop-box for low-level leaks (the assumption is that high level leaks will continue to come directly to trusted reporters). Way on the other end of the spectrum, Al Jazeera has done the same, already scoring its first coup: the so-called " Palestinian Papers " . The Guardian is likely to follow suit too (it also has its own Wikileaks book due for publication in February) as is any other paper that doesn't want to be left behind. Once enough of these Wikileaks alternatives have launched, leakers will be able to make their choice: either to give their information to an individual publication that's sympathetic to their cause, or to use Openleaks to share it between all of them. And at that point, Wikileaks and its control-freak, middle-man founder will have nothing left to add, save for sound and fury. The disruptor will become the disrupted, and Bill Keller can enjoy the last laugh. | |
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