Answers on Expertise

As a follow-up on my previous post…

Quest for Expertise « Disparate.

(I was looking for the origin of the “10 years or 10,000 hours to be an expert” claim.)

Interestingly enough, that post is getting a bit of blog attention.

• OLDaily ~ by Stephen Downes.
• Quest for Expertise – elearnspace.

I’m so grateful about this attention that it made me tweet the following:

Trackbacks, pings, and blog comments are blogger gifts.

I also posted a question about this on Mahalo Answers (after the first comment, by Alejna, appeared on my blog, but before other comments and trackbacks appeared). I selected glaspell’s answer as the best answer
(glaspell also commented on my blog entry).

At this point, my impression is that what is taken as a “rule” on expertise is a simplification of results from a larger body of research with an emphasis on work by K. Anders Ericsson but with little attention paid to primary sources.
The whole process is quite satisfying, to me. Not just because we might all gain a better understanding of how this “claim” became so generalized, but because the process as a whole shows both powers and limitations of the Internet. I tend to claim (publicly) that the ‘Net favours critical thinking (because we eventually all claims with grains of salt). But it also seems that, even with well-known research done in English, it can be rather difficult to follow all the connections across the literature. If you think about more obscure work in non-dominant languages, it’s easy to realize that Google’s dream of organizing the world’s information isn’t yet true.

By the by, I do realize that my quest was based on a somewhat arbitrary assumption: that this “rule of thumb” is now understood as a solid rule. But what I’ve noticed in popular media since 2006 leads me to believe that the claim is indeed taken as a hard and fast rule.

I’m not blaming anyone, in this case. I don’t think that anyone’s involvement in the “chain of transmission” was voluntarily misleading and I don’t even think that it was that essential. As with many other ideas, what “sticks” is what seems to make sense in context. Actually, this strong tendency for “convenient” ideas to be more widely believed relates to a set of tricky issues with which academics have to deal, on a daily basis. Sagan’s well-known “baloney detector” is useful, here. But it’s also in not so wide use.

One thing which should also be clear: I’m not saying that Ericsson and other researchers have done anything shoddy or inappropriate. Their work is being used outside of its original context, which is often an issue.

Mass media coverage of academic research was the basis of series of entries on the original Language Log, including one of my favourite blogposts, Mark Liberman’s Language Log: Raising standards — by lowering them. The main point, I think, is that secluded academics in the Ivory Tower do little to alleviate this problem.

But I digress.
And I should probably reply to the other comments on the entry itself.

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How Can Google Beat Facebook?

It might not be so hard:

As I see it, the biggest shortcoming of social-networking sites is their inability to play well with others. Between MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tribe, Pownce, and the numerous also-rans, it seems as if maintaining an active presence at all of these sites could erode into becoming a full-time job. If Google can somehow create a means for all of these services to work together, and seamlessly interact with the Google family, then perhaps this is the killer app that people don’t even realize they’ve been waiting for. Google gives social networking another go | Media Sphere – Josh Wolf blogs about the new information age – CNET Blogs

Some might take issue at Wolf’s presumption. Many of us have realised in 1997 that the “killer app” for social networking services is for them to work together. But the point is incredibly important and needs to be made again and again.

Social Networking Services work when people connect through it. The most intricate “network effect” you can think of. For connections to work, existing social relationships and potential social relationships need to be represented in the SNS as easily as possible. What’s more, investing effort and time in building one’s network relates quite directly with the prospective life of SNS. Faced with the eventuality of losing all connections in a snap because everybody has gone to “the next thing,” the typical SNS user is wary. Given the impression that SNS links can survive the jump to “the next one” (say, via a simple “import” function), the typical SNS user is likely to use the SNS to its fullest potential. This is probably one of several reasons for the success of Facebook. And Google can certainly put something together which benefits from this principle.

Yeah, yeah, Wolf  was referring more specifically to the “synchronisation” of activities on different SNS or SNS-like systems. That’s an important aspect of the overall “SNS interoperability” issue. Especially if SNS are important parts of people’s lives. But I prefer to think about the whole picture.

Another thing which has been mentioned is the connection Google could make between SNS and its other tools. One approach would be to build more “social networking features” (beyond sharing) into its existing services. The other could be to integrate Google tools into SNS (say, top-notch Facebook applications). Taken together, these two approaches would greatly benefit both Google and the field of social networking in general.

All in all, what I could easily see would be a way for me to bring all my SNS “content” to a Google SNS, including existing links. From a Google SNS, I would be able to use different “social-enabled” tools from Google like the new Gmail, an improved version of Google Documents, and the Blogger blogging platform. Eventually, most of my online activities would be facilitated by Google but I would still be able to use non-Google tools as I wish.

There’s a few tools I’m already thinking about, which could make sense in this “Google-enabled social platform.” For one, the “ultimate social bookmarking tool” for which I’ve been building feature wishlists. Then, there’s the obvious need for diverse applications which can use a centralised online storage system. Or the browser integration possible with something like, I don’t know, the Google toolbar… 😉

Given my interest in educational technology, I can’t help but think about online systems for course management (like Moodle and Sakai). Probably too specific, but Google could do a wonderful job at it.

Many people are certainly thinking about advertisement, revenue-sharing, p2p for media files, and other Google-friendly concepts. These aren’t that important for me.

I can’t say that I have a very clear image of what Google’s involvement in the “social networking sphere” will look like. But I can easily start listing Google products and features which are desperately calling for integration in a social context: Scholar, Web History, Docs, Reader, Browser Sync, Gcal, Gmail, Notebook, News, Mobile, YouTube, Ride Finder, Blog Comments, Music Trends, University Search, MeasureMap, Groups, Alerts, Bookmarks…

Sometimes, I really wonder why a company like Google can’t “get its act together” in making everything it does fit in a simple platform. They have the experts, the money, the users. They just need to make it happen.

Ah, well…

Readership to Comments Conversion

As mentioned recently (among other times), I’d like to get more reader comments than I do now. Haven’t been really serious about it as I’m not using any of the several methods I know to get more comments. For instance, I realise shorter, quick-and-dirty posts are likely to get me more comments than my longer ramblings. Everybody knows that inflammatory (Dvorak-like) posts get more comments. I also know that commenting on other people’s blog entries is the best way to receive comments from fellow bloggers. Not to mention generating something of a community aspect through my blog. And I could certainly ask more questions in my blog posts. So I guess I’m not doing my part here.

It’s not that I care so much about getting more comments. It’s just that I do like receiving comments on blog posts. Kind of puts me back into mailing-list mode. So I (frequently) end up wondering out loud about blog comments. I don’t really want to make more of an effort. I just want my cake and eat it too. (Yes, this one is an egotistical entry.)

One thing I keep noticing is that I get more comments when I get less readers. It’s a funny pattern. Sounds like the ice-cream/crime (ice-crime?) correlation but I’m not sure what the shared cause may be. So my tendency is to think that I might get more comments if I get lower readership. I know, I know: sounds like wishful thinking. But there’s something fun about this type of thinking.

Now, how can I decrease my readership? Well, since a lot of readers seem to come to this blog through Web searches and Technorati links, I guess I could decrease my relevance in those contexts. Kind of like reverse-SEO.

As my unseemly large number of categories might be responsible for at least some of that search/Technorati traffic, getting rid of some of those categories might help.

On this WordPress.com blog, I’ve been using categories like tags. The Categories section of WordPress.com’s own blog post editor makes this use very straightforward. Instead of selecting categories, I just type them in a box and press the Add button. Since WordPress.com categories are also Technorati links, this categories-as-tags use made some sense. But I ended up with some issues, especially with standalone blog editors. Not only do most standalone blog editors have categories as selection items (which makes my typical tagging technique inappropriate) but the incredibly large number of categories on this blog makes it hard to use any blog editor which fetches those categories.

Not too long ago, WordPress.com added a tagging system to their (limited) list of supported features. Given my issues with categories, this seemed like a very appropriate feature for me to use. So the few posts I wrote since that feature became available have both tags and categories.

But what about all of those categories? Well, in an apparent effort to beef up the tagging features, WordPress.com added Category to Tag Converter. (I do hope tagging and categories development on WordPress.com will continue at a steady pace.)

This converter is fairly simple. It lists all the categories used on your blog and you can either select which categories you want to convert into tags or press the Convert All button to get all categories transformed into tags. Like a neat hack, it does what it should do. I still had to spend quite a bit of time thinking about which categories I wanted to keep. Because tags and categories perform differently and because I’m not completely clear on how tags really work (are they also Technorati tags? Can we get a page of tags? A tag cloud?), it was a bit of a shot in the dark. I pretty much transformed into tags most categories which I had only applied to one post. It still leaves me with quite a few categories which aren’t that useful but I’ll sort these out later, especially after I see the effects tags may have on my blogging habits and on my blog itself.

As luck would have it, this change in my blog may have as an impact a decrease in readership and an increase in comments. My posts might end up being more relevant for categories and tags with which they are associated. And I might end up having sufficiently few categories that I could, in fact, use blog editors on this blog.

While I was converting these categories into tags, I ended up changing some categories. Silly me thought that by simply changing the name of a category to be the same as the name of another category, I’d end up with “merged categories” (all blog posts in the category I changed being included in the list for the new categories). Turns out, it doesn’t really work like that and I ended up with duplicate categories. Too bad. Just one of those WordPress.com quirks.

Speaking of WordPress.com itself. I do like it as a blogging system. It does/could have a few community-oriented features. I would probably prefer it if it were more open, like a self-hosted WordPress installation. But the WordPress.com team seems to mostly implement features they like or that they see as being advantageous for WordPress.com as a commercial entity. Guess you could say WordPress.com is the Apple of the blogging world! (And I say this as a Macaholic.)

Just found out that WordPress.com has a new feature called AnswerLinks, which looks like it can simplify the task of linking to some broad answers. Like several other WordPress.com features, this one looks like it’s mostly meant as a cross-promotion than a user-requested feature, but it still sounds interesting.

Still, maybe the development of tag features is signalling increased responsiveness on the part of WordPress.com. As we all know, responsiveness is a key to success in the world of online business ventures.

Solving the Comment Problem

Blog writers like comments. Some bloggers just want traffic, especially if they are getting money from advertisement, but many of us would gladly give up a lot of traffic for more comments.

Problem is, it seems, many people aren’t too keen on leaving comments, even when they find a specific post quite interesting.

So, Alejna devised a nifty chart with shorthand notation for some comments. Maybe that’s what I should use here. Although… Alejna’s chart items are funny and appropriate to her blog. I guess I should devise my own chart.

Actually, it reminds me of the marking scheme I use with student assignments, in decreasing order of preference:

• IF: Insightful
• OC: Original and Creative
• HP: Honest and Personal
• TR: Thoughtful and Reflexive
• EX: Appropriate Examples
• ED: Elaborate and Detailed
• CSF: Concise and Straightforward

I often put two or three of these in feedback to a single assignment. So an assignment can be both insightful and using appropriate examples. It may sound arbitrary, but it works very well for me as it does correspond to the way I read assignments. I really look for insight, first and foremost, but conciseness is a positive feature.

So, maybe I should have a chart for blog comments which would be similar to this. Of course, my own criteria for my own blog posts aren’t really the same as those for student assignments. And the order of preference seems to be quite different for blog posts. But there’s something about this which makes sense to me in a weird way.

Ah, well…