Beth Mazur › Comments

the paper is presented as a Scribd doc -- shows how clueless they are in using the Web -- the people writing this paper are clearly not of the generation they speak about - Allan Benamer from twhirl

Is it on Scribd? I downloaded the PDF... And I think the observations on the data are solid and insightful. They're old skool researchers but the analysis is light. I believe they're trying to spur discussion instead of drawing absolute conclusions - Daniel Bachhuber

@abenamer Sorry to miss meeting you in person at NetSquared. We are not so fond of Scribd either -- but in foundation land you have to do whitepapers sometimes. But how would you take findings like these to the web? - Eric Johnson

HTML with CSS is all that's necessary -- it's really hard to resyndicate if it's in that Scribed format -- I love pushing that kind of stuff out to my readers but I think thick document types don't really make sense in the heavily text-driven social media world - Allan Benamer

BTW, I made that same comment about a UN Foundation piece on wireless tech -- it was a PDF in their case. I just want people to think about repost opps when other people retweet or repost on their blogs... - Allan Benamer

@abenamer I agree with you re general yuckiness of pdf. But my question is a bit bigger than pdf vs html, though. How might we do some of what @danielbachhuber is suggesting -- spur discussion in ways that might help us all apply this stuff? Blogosphere is one way... - Eric Johnson

ceding control to your users is priority #1 -- keeping content in a fixed and static way is proof Case Foundation hasn't learned this yet. Sometimes, your own general principles can be exposed by existing practice. I recommend incorporating more and more UI widgets into your site that will allow for more interactivity not less. - Allan Benamer

@abenamer I think putting a report, as a finished product and not a blog post, in HTML is a barrier to entry. It's way easy to print as PDF, and not so easy to print a report as a website. I would bet they have a PDF instead of a custom-styled website just because it's that much easier to do. - Daniel Bachhuber

See that's the problem. A "report" is basically a conversation that has ended. It's really tough to comment on something like that because most people will be intimidated by the finished nature of the text. There's a kind of architecture that's evinced by a report that makes it feel more like a cathedral instead of a bazaar. And bazaars are where conversations are at... - Allan Benamer

The New Media Consortium released a "report" but they did it wiki style to encourage the conversation ..http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki... - Beth Kanter

@kanter Thanks for that link! @abenamer CF's piece of the conversation is for the moment here: http://blog.socialcitizens.org/archive... . Comments are open there, and of course everywhere. - Eric Johnson

I have to say that I think there's some benefit to the traditional report -- a snapshot that captures a moment of research -- so the document may be sealed but the conversation and the next version can be in the works. What do others think? Do reports have value as snapshots within a larger conversation? - Marnie Webb

I was going to share the report on my blog and found that the "embed code" was disabled because the report is private. Regardless of the format of the information, there was apparently a choice not to have the report easily shared. I agree with Allan that using widgets on the site should encourage interactivity, not less. This also appears to be inconsistent with the message being communicated inside the paper. - Roger Carr

@rogercarr do you think the inability to share was intentional or just a technical glitch? - Beth Kanter

Downloaded the PDF. Will read it later. If it was web-i-fied I'd be interacting with it already. - Ruby Sinreich

Reports are fine but they feel awfully outmoded in a social media context. Think of a "report" as a closed-source program and threaded comments as open-source. Reports are naturally closed-architecture as I'm hinting at when I mention the Cathedral and the Bazaar. As a result, it should be no surprise that there are more comments on this thread about the report than on the blog itself as we're dealing with open ended issues here. - Allan Benamer

I agree, Allan, that there's a lot from the open nature of comments and that there's a missed opportunity to get people to share the reports. I guess I just don't think it's either/or. It can be both/and. - Marnie Webb

@rogercarr It's a tech glitch, not secrecy. Embed code did work, but it looks like Scribd now has a bug. It does work from the paper's home on Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc... (use the icon above the paper). Ah, tech! - Eric Johnson

And I should say that I'm the guy at the Case Foundation who thought Scribd was a good compromise between the "paper" we started with -- designed pdf -- and the sharing needs that Allan is so right about. Budget and deadlines came into our decision, of course. For us the paper is background -- more for the foundation/funder/corporate audience. The puzzle is how to build on that background -- conversationally and otherwise -- to help us all to better practice. - Eric Johnson

Marnie, of course it's both/and but looking at the current data (3 posts on the blog versus dozens here on FriendFeed) it seems to me the report format isn't a winner. Eric, what if you posted the report in chunks on the blog? Sometimes, serialization and hopefully, resulting syndication can help commenters find spaces in the text to comment. I think a social news release to relevant bloggers might also be in order. - Allan Benamer