When collaboration fails

When I started researching this topic, one of the sites that impressed me was CoMagz-Linkadelic Magazine. This seemed like a great example of publishing the Web 2.0 way. Users write stories and submit them. Others vote for the stories that appear. The best ones appear on the front page. A bit like digg, I suppose, but where the users write the entire story. Great, I thought, this is what it’s all about! Except, it isn’t.

At the risk of offending the CoMagz army, who may well be legion, it doesn’t seem to work, at least for me. The same stories are on the front page for weeks at a time. Company press releases are cut and pasted into stories. As I write, the current top story on the site is a press release from Intel that was news a couple of weeks ago. And the resulting webzine ends up lacking a theme. There are a lot of technology stories, like there are a lot of places on the web, but also a lot of mush. What’s the problem here? One issue, I imagine, is that it’s a lot less easy to submit an entire news story, with pictures, than it is to submit a link with a sentence of explanatory text, like digg.

The other issue is, if you’re an aspiring writer, why not just sign up for a blogger account and get an entire site for yourself? And if you are very good, why not submit your work to a magazine that will pay you? The voting aspect is also problematic. If you write something, do you really want your peers to then vote on whether it’s any good? It doesn’t matter if a site you’ve ‘dugg’ doesn’t make the front page – that was the site’s fault, not yours. Lastly, most writers are happy to get constructive feedback, but the bottom line given by ComMagz of a mark out of five can’t really do that, especially at the low end of the scale.

If I were feeling very pessimistic, this might lead me to believe that the web population is (a) lazy, (b) self-promoting and (c) insecure. Thankfully, I can always go back to flickr, YouTube, wickipedia and the hundred or so blogs I read on a regular basis to start feeling hopeful again.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Understanding digg again, natural order
• Evil of Digg Overestimated
• Understanding digg: rate, not volume

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