Collaboration Matters!

I was discussing this with a couple of people yesterday after I saw half a dozen postings about Ultralite (which I thought was old news). Take the rest of this reply with a pinch of salt I haven't had my first coffee of the day yet :-)

Don't misunderstand me Planet Lotus is a fantastic resource and I'm not tempted to go back to my blogreader just yet.

I may do though. Why? Because I think PL is too successful (in raising the profile of blogging generally and some personalities in particular) and I suspect it's encouraging people to post too often with too little content or to post to stir up the masses.

This is not a judgement on individuals, people should post what they want to post - that's the whole point. It's just some things are subjectively useful or interesting to me and others not. I use the "hover over digest" feature a lot to find things worth reading.

Being included in PL is pretty much all or nothing, anything you post to your blog will appear in PL. That restricts what I blog about or whether or blog at all. Of late I've not blogged because I have had time do anything I'm currently doing justice (though I do feel a post about SEO coming up). I also want to post personal stuff that I don't want to appear on PL.

I'd like to have a mechanism (short of creating separate blogs or asking to be removed from PL) to mark a post as suitable for inclusion at PL. Say if I tagged a post "PlanetLotus".

In summary I think PL already provides tools for the reader to discern the wheat from the chaff. It would be nice if there was a mechanism for authors to target the PL audience on a post by post basis and thereby reduce the noise. Of course that won't stop anyone targeting PL with posts that do little more than tell us IBM blew it's nose :-)

Jason

I think it's encouraging me to focus to much on what the contributors to PL are talking about. At least when I used my RSS reader I had a wider spectrum of personal and industry inputs. Nobody's fault but mine, but something I plan to address :-)

One thing which I have found extremely useful from PL has been anyone I need to find, usually is listed and their contact info can be found.

As to posting, I think it encourages people to not be repetitive but at teh same time sometimes causes one to be competitive in their "read mine" posting.

I think for many of us we would be lost int he internet stream and few would be reading our blogs because honestly, how do you find a blog these dyas if you are not heavy into technical things?

Herd mentality, of course there is, but it's no different than looking at digg or yahoo's news fedd or google's.

At least we are all Lotus happy and want to read others work.

Now, how will this help Ed and his IBM branding problems :-)

First, I too think PL is one of the greatest things to come to Lotus blogging. It has taken the place of both my RSS reader and my blog roll, and that's progress ;)

You stated

"This is just MHO, but I find that I am tending to check PlanetLotus before I post any content to check that others haven't already posted it. Whereas previously you would have regularly seen 4 or 5 posts on the same topic from different people's points of view, I think this is happening less and less often, meaning that there fewer different views being posted. Of course there are still situations where that does occur, and debate does take place within blog comments. However, it does concern me that PlanetLotus could act almost as a proactive filter on content being posted. Now this might be a good thing - less "echo-chamber", less duplication etc. But I have to say it concerns me that one site can have such a large influence in this way."

I sometimes check PL before I post - if the post is on a timely topic, then I do - but that's not a bad thing, I believe. Here's why. At least in my case, I check the other postings so far; if my opinion has already been stated on the topic, I respond to that person's post; if I have a different perspective or opinion, then I post it while linking to either the first mention or the original post itself. In some instances, I even reference other opinions with dissenting opinions of my own.

So I do think that there are probably less topics on timely topics; and I think that this definitely reduces the "echo effect" - but this is a good thing. I think that if someone was going to simply repeat what someone else has said, then it is good for them to not post. I hope that others act as I do, and simply don't do repetitive or "me too" posts; but if they do have something new to offer, then post it.

Overall I think that PL is a net-good thing for the community. And while your opinions may have some truth to them, I think that the community will be "self-correcting" and will eventually become a better community than it was.

OK, time to go think of a post, and then check PL to see if it has been posted before ;)

--Rock

I agree that there might be a slight reduction in content due to an author thinking, "oh, somebody already posted about that, so why bother", but that hasn't stopped the community from collectively posting entry after entry after entry after entry about the new iPhone. Yes, we know it's purty. Yes, we know IBM should have made sure it supported Domino the moment it was released and not just Exchange. It's been out for months, can we move on already?

What I've also noticed, though, is a huge amount of rubbernecking going on: like people driving by a highway accident who, for some reason, feel compelled to look to see if anyone's dead, we as readers of the site are clicking on the provocative headlines and not the technical ones. A quick sampling from the last 24 hours:

"Copy to Clipboard using LS" - 47 hits

"Sigh..." - 314 hits

So... as I take a break from (hopefully) productive work to briefly scan the PL headlines for something interesting, I could find out how to use LotusScript to write to the user's clipboard, or I could find out why Toohey's sighing. I actually think it's a reflection on us as readers - NOT as authors - that the latter is going to win that duel almost every time. Hence, it makes a vivid statement about the average priorities of those of us who visit the site, and undermines any assertion that involvement in the community is an aid to, not a distraction from, productivity. If the vast majority of us viewed it as a productivity tool, the provocative titles would be getting the least hits, not the most.

Tim, how do we know Chris isn't sighing in relief because he just figured out how to get a document to be a child of more than one parent in a view?

There's no telling what he's sighing about. That's why there's so many clicks.

"copy to clipboard in LS" being low simply indicates that...

1) copying to the clipboard isn't a priority for a lot of people RIGHT THIS MINUTE

2) a reader realizes that they now have a Google criteria for when they need that code. Why click? You don't need to read it now. It's filed in the global bank of knowledge that is the internet.