Insight Community

A few suggestions which I'm sure are already in the pipeline:

(1) a tab called 'My Issues' (or something like that) that shows you the issues you are working on or would like to work on. Could be part of 'Issues for you' but I figure that is reserved for commissioned issues assigned to you.

(2) when there are hundreds and thousands of issues, a search would be nice, and of course a directory/tagcloud for browsing could be cool too.

(3)  The RSS feeds for the tabs are useful, but it is not immediately obvious. I only noticed it after accidentally clicking on it. Maybe because they look like icons for the tabs, rather than the rss function. The word 'RSS' in front of the icon might help, or a dedicated section showing all the feeds you can subscribe to.

Question:

* Does my reputation score improve for contributing to this feedback challenge? ;) 

Your legal agreement is going to keep me from contributing much.  These are the specific problem areas, with a rating of 1 to 10 where 10 is a huge problem:

1. >> we will have the right to republish your written work .... and alter your submissions as we may determine necessary

     Concern Level 5 - This is really after #4 is resolved.

2. >> Techdirt shall hold all right, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to the submission.
3. >> You agree that the submissions shall be deemed "works for hire" under copyright law, and you agree to assign, and upon their creation, automatically assign, to us the ownership of such works, including copyright interests and any other intellectual property in such works, without the necessity of any further consideration.

    Concern level 10 - Joint copyright is acceptable, but not full rights. 

4. >> We may provide your written submissions to third parties without any indication of your authorship.

   Concern level 8 - One of the reasons to join is to build my stature. That can't happen if I'm anonymous.

Can I submit multiple insights on one issue?

 I might have several different ideas about an issue which would not fit well together in one long entry, also I'm more likely to have the time to devote to several short and sweet items than one long all encompassing essay.

This might affect the compensation scheme a bit, is there scope for different payments for responses to a single item?

Bloggers will need to know how their answers fared. For example, if the top 3 earn $100, and I don't get any money, I need to know if I was #4, or #25 in terms of ranking of the quality of my answer. If I'm #25, I'll know you have better bloggers on that issue, and won't reply again. This actually helps Techdirt, too, because I don't think the companies want to sift through 50 submissions, half of which are crap. The whole idea is to get the best blogger pundits, not the most. This would require your companies to rank the answes - at least the top dozen or so. Then the rest could be listed as > 12. Bloggers should als be given an "out of" figure, so that we know how many people we're up against. Its not really fair to have us competing in such a vacuum. At least after the fact, tell us: "Your answer was ranked >12 / 32".

 It would also be useful for the bloggers to see the answers that were in the money, to better understand the quality and depth that was required to win.

More questions more often. That oughta do it...

Great service, and great opportunity. Cheers! 

Great idea you folks have here. I'm loving it so far but I have a suggestion.

I would love to see a bit more in our profiles, both public and private. I know we have a score and a rating (mine: Score: 2 -- Rating: 3) but what exactly does this mean? Can we see the top performers? The top contributors?

1) Provide some documentation for people suggesting the best way to approach answers.  There seem to be some short answers that are just rattled off with little research.  Explaining to contributors how best to win might improve the response quality. 

2) Market your services to consultants - they are the best qualified to answer questions, and if you can create a nice community of talent, more questions will appear.  

I've been experiencing two problems on InsightCommunity:

 Firstly your textarea input system here is incredibly buggy - it's difficult to delete sections of type and it also fights with Firefox's built-in spell check.  It also seems to add random indentation and spaces.

The other problem I've experienced is that when I submit my insight the browser hangs and for some reason the insight is duplicated a total of three times.  Maybe it's just my browser but I'm running standard Windows/Firefox setup.

How about an email to tell me that my input was voted as a "top insight"!

I've only just found out, and I was really pleased, but I submitted it a month and a half ago!

Also, where's my check? :)

It seems to me that those questions marked with "No Expiration" are a bit of a cheat. If they never run out, how will the contributors ever be marked or paid? The questioner can just open as many of these as they like and never have to pay up, so the community will just get filled with them won't it?

I don't know the full rules behind this, but it seems open to exploitation to me.

Here's a simple but powerful suggestion.  When looking at completed solutions, put the three "Top Insight" choices at the top so that I can at a glance get a look at the three winning insights  without having to scroll through all the options.  As an alternative, allow viewers to vote on their favorite insights (a simple +1 / -1), and give any Top Insights a head start in this point count... then display the highest scoring insights first.  Think of it like an amazon.com reviewers and comments list, where you see only the most valuable comments unless you ask to see all the comments.

A great site that does a simple but powerful version of this is one from a video game community that I'm fond of.  Wowhead.com uses a community-policed system to rank its user comments.  First posts start off with 1 pt.  Any user logged in can simply give +1/-1 to any comment.  Posts that fall to 0 or below points are removed from view after a short period of time.  Posts that get to 10 or more points are highlighted in green; 50 or more in blue.  Slashdot also has a version of this with its karma points, but it tends to be more complex and not nearly as transparent or intuitive anymore.

Follow through.

If a submitter particularly likes a piece of insight it would be good if they could get in contact and discuss ways to take the relationship forward.

I think good insight comes as a result of group discussion were participants can constantly poke holes in each other's arguments and refine their approach. There is nothing better than a thought provoking question and a group of people who each contribute only to the aspects of the topic that they are good at. I also recommend a system that participants could digg or bury (vote) each other's arguments.

Money is a good incentive, yet isn't motivating enough since many consultants with good insights are already making a good income.

Questions such as "what is the future of Digital Media industry" are also very broad and abstract. In real life we manage to exchange few questions and narrow down to what client is really looking for, but here that option isn't available. 

This is an exciting experiment. Theoretically, you have invented the most natural form of cooperating/doing business in network society. However, the user experience is pretty unexciting. Some points: 

 a. too many typos everywhere.

b. annoying bugs, like my own german email-address that I have been using for 10 years was not accepted, not sure if it was the .de or the domain-name (bruehlhof) that tripped the system.

c. there seems to be no feedback-mechanism to the "expert" opinions. Comments are used very sparingly and are not very related to the postings. At this point I get more insights from skimming macrumors or slashdot.

 d. no feeling of being part of a community. Not sure how I could/would look at the profiles of other contributors. I do not feel I want to interact/hang out. No VIP-feeling of hanging out with the über-technorati. 

e. some of the challenges are actually challenging. Others seem quite constructed and a bit awkward. 

d. You should not allow clients to go on fishing expeditions with 5 similarly worded challenges that only pay out if the client is satisfied. This makes you look really needy. 

e. Some of the answers are really second-rate.  

But overall, I think this is the way to go. And maybe you should not only be in the business of creating the techdirt community, but also in setting up these communities for others.

Feature request: my profile should also link to all of the comments that I have made. This would allow me to find them more easily if I want to re-purpose them and would allow me to get a better sense of other community members.

Sean Murphy www.skmurphy.com 408-252-9676

Usability feature

Allow insights to be inserted into you calendar of choice, say Outlook or Google, so you can keep track of expiry dates.

I know I have missed some submission dates on an insight due to other influences and not checking frequently. simple reminders could help with the volume of submissions. 

One of the reasons I signed up was to see what others thought of various issues - contribute some of my own knowledge and insight in return for seeing others. As an agency operating in thesocial media arena the cash is not really what interests me - its the access to other ideas and the chance to bat them around with a pre-screened group of international peers.

It'd be interesting to know if you have different participation rates for the open V closed cases?

As someone that just recently submitted a case and have spent some time analyzing the Insights submitted for the Case we submitted the following would be useful:

- Perhaps there should be consistent Insight entry fields. For example a Summary required field (i had one response that summarized at the end with simple bullets which was helpful) and it would be excellent right up front if the responses had a “position statement”

- Would like a summary landing page with the author’s name (link to full insight) and their ‘position statement’ I had 14 responses and it was hard to navigate even after I printed and wanted to get back to the specific insight for comment, review etc.

- Would be awesome if there was a notes area that wouldn’t get published publicly but the reviewer could share their notes etc. with others that are reviewing along with them within their companies (even if on the same userid) or if i start reviewing and have to go onto another task i would be able to login and see my last notes (like the Edit Your Insight Feature). ( I had to first do it on paper (which i left behind at the office when i needed it! and then had to transfer my thoughts to a word document to send to my colleague for review)

I am missing a place for participants to hang out. 

Also, more enlightenment on your strategy. A timeline, an explanation where you want to be in two years, etc. 

You could ask the winning insights to help put the final document together. That way, they would learn and feel they are part of the team. 

 Sometimes Techdirt feels as empty as any secondlife pavillon. 

Mini Answers:  I think it's ePinions that let's reviewers either write a full review, or alternatively write a mini review.

Sometimes, I don't really want to respond to a question with a full answer (don't know the material deeply enough, don't have the time, don't think I'll win) yet I do have a burning point or two that may be valuable to the client. There is currently no mechanism for me to post this mini answer. In fact, there is a disincentive, becuase mini answers look like @#$ beside long, well organized answers. Thus the mini answer, although valuable, is incomplete and might earn the writer a bad review, and a drop in his average score.

TD should find a way to categorize and enable mini answers, and set expectations differently. Perhaps the reward structure for these could also be just reputational. But for sure, it doesn't make sense to penalize people for adding a one sentence gem. 

Change the winner's ribbon icon. 

The red ribbons for a top insight look more like a red scarf. Maybe if you put some blue in the center of the circle insted of the same color as the background, then it wouldn't look like a hole. Or, you could just name it "The Red Scarf Award" for coziest answer on a cold winter night.

• Have a section of a user's profile show how much money has been earned and whether a payment has been sent. I was wondering why I haven't received payment yet until I read the FAQ and realized that I won't get it until I have made more than $250. However, I don't know exactly how much I have in my "account".
• An estimated time when insight scores will be release after the insight is closed.
• If possible, I would think off-line marketing would be interesting, but not traditional ads. Things like stickers, clothing, coffee mugs, etc. could be good conversation starters.

I managed to grab a few minutes at the Money:Tech conference to talk to Mike Masnick about his company, Techdirt, and specifically the Techdirt Insight Community. What he said intrigued and excited me: it seemed like a fantastic way for bloggers to be able to monetize their ideas and insights. At first.

I, like many bloggers, love to receive and to answer very specific questions from my readers. (This post, for instance, was very popular and was basically a reply to an email.) Blogging is a conversation, and this is one great way to get a conversation rolling. What's more, if my answer is good and/or insightful, my blog entry might actually have some substantial value to the person asking the question. That's the idea behind Techdirt: companies ask questions, and get a large number of valuable answers from various bloggers. In return, the best answers (as judged by the questioner) get paid a few hundred dollars each; the top bloggers on Techdirt can make some pretty substantial sums on the site, without having to deal with any advertising at all.

In practice, however, I'm much less excited about Techdirt than I am in theory. For one thing, the whole thing resides behind a very high registration firewall. No, you don't need to pay to become a member. But you do need to be a blogger, and fill out an application form, and wait some time for your application to be reviewed and accepted. Unless and until that happens, you can't see anything going on: questions and answers, be they current or old, are all off limits to both you and Google.

Bloggers are free to post their own insights on their own blogs. But most don't do that, as far as I can make out. And in any case when that happens the conversation becomes fragmented: one insight here, another insight there, largely defeating the point of having the whole thing going on at one place. And since the Techdirt site is off-limits, it only really makes sense to post your initial answer on your blog: after that you're responding to stuff which 99% of your readers aren't allowed to read.

Oh, and did I mention? For reasons which make no sense to me whatsoever, even registered members aren't allowed to read the open questions unless and until they've answered that question themselves first, at some non-negligible length. It's yet another barrier to conversation and collaboration: first you have to go through the registration process, then you have to answer the question yourself, and only then are you considered worthy of reading what your fellow bloggers have to say on any given subject. You might well find that everything you said is redundant, and has been written already by many other bloggers, and all the effort you put into answering the question was a waste of time. In which case, too bad.

Mike told me via email that "we do this to ensure that the initial thoughts are your own, rather than immediately built on others" – but isn't the whole point of blogging that it builds on the thoughts of others? Mike also told me that things might change – he hinted as much on his (open) blog here. But for the time being, I have to say that the Techdirt system seems broken to me.

And the proof of the pudding, to me, is in the eating. After registering as a Techdirt community member, I looked through a few closed cases. They generally featured precious little discussion; the vast majority are simply a concatenation of unrelated stand-alone answers, as you'd expect if the bloggers weren't allowed to see what their peers had written. And boy are those answers boring. It's as though the minute someone starts offering them money, bloggers transmogrify into dry-as-dust financial analysts, losing all hints of personality or verve. I can see why they don't post this stuff on their public blogs: no one would read it.

I think the problem is that the money poisons many if not all the great aspects of blogging. Rather than linking joyously to someone else with an excellent insight, the bloggers are incentivized to treat that person as a competitor. As a result, you can't really trust what the different bloggers are saying about each other. And people – with good reason – think that long and detailed and boring answers are much more likely to earn them money than blog-style hit-and-run insights. Which in turn means that there's precious little value in the answers for anybody but the original questioner. The answers feel like chores, rather than the kind of blog entry which anybody would ever want to write if they weren't being paid.

So for a few devoted members of the community, there's an income-generating opportunity here. As a widely-applicable model of monetizing blog content, however, I think Techdirt falls well short of what it could be. Here's hoping it evolves into something much more fabulous – and open – than it presently is.

The Insight submission interface could have a tad more HTML options,
like

• <hr> support
  
• more inline text CSS options
  
• a "Quote" feature, that outlines
  quotes from other posts in a box
  with a slightly different bg color
  
• A simple "Send a Private Message"
  starter before/after/near the
  Expert's name in their Insights
  
  Just my $.02  ...

  I like to make my Insights well-formatted/attractive to read, as opposed to "plain old B-&-W" text.

  The "Save" function when creating Insights will both allow me to create text and layout formatting,
and display them in the saved edition of the Insight.

  However; When the Insight is submitted, many of the formatting attributes I used and expect to
see (per the "Saved" version) in the submitted insight, are stripped out w/o warning.

  If layout and text options won't be transposed to the Insight when submitted, these attributes and
formatting should NOT be "viewable" when saving a message.

  This very disconcerting shortcoming tricks me into believing I am in fact using a WYSIWYG editor,
which I sadly discover later (and with no way to correct the mess this creates) that I am not,
With No Warning before the final submission of that Insight.

Please fix this?

SOme features, which I think should be added to the Techdirt Insight Community:

• Displaying cases that received the most number of responses and also the winner of insight. If the insight is comfedential then the winner's name can be displayed on the website. Something like Best insight or TechDirt Champion.
• Displaying cases that were recently accessed by users
• Displaying how manymembers the Techdirt community has, listing them with respect to their expertise.

At this point of time I can think of these options, would be able to contribute more soon

Vikram Deo 

One initial thought: it's a little intimidating, as a new user, to self-identify myself as an "expert" in certain areas.

There are some fields in which I have a strong interest and may be able to provide some insight on, but am hesitant to qualify myself as an expert in. It seems a little pretentious.

If this is even an issue worth addressing (and not just an issue of self-confidence), I wonder whether there are some simple semantic changes that could provide a solution. I'd be much less hesitant to identify "fields of interest" than "fields of expertise," though, I suppose the TIC is supposed to be more about expertise than mere interest... But, then and again, wouldn't the areas of interest of a TIC expert still convey some expertise?

Just a quick thought on initial impressions.

IDEA 1:  Useability of Website 

One of the things I believe is missing, is a "dashboard" for quick monitoring of both the community and cases.  Features of the dashboard could include any of the following....

 1.  A quick view of the open cases - headline and maybe a few words - sorted by "topic" headings.

 2.  A view of the number of responses to the case(s) - much like how comments are tracked on blogs

 3.  Potentially a "meter" for "days to close" or for "activity" -- these would be goal or deadline oriented views

 4.  A quick link list for my activity - draft responses, final responses, open/closed - that typ of thing.  I can filter this through the "my insights" tab, but it would be easier to get it right on my main page.

 So, think of my initial entry page, as a personal portal into two things -- a) community activity and b) personal activity.

IDEA 2:  Topics/Cases

I understand this is "for profit" venture for your organization [and for that, I get rewarded for my participation].  But, there are general topics that could be discussed - beyond the paid cases - that could turn into commercial "opinion and white papers" - marketed beyond the paid for cases.  Participants could be provided with a "share" of the total proceeds.  This could be a big money maker for all involved -- let's say there is a 70/30 split between participants and Techdirt - and a white paper would sell for $1000 [makes for easy math].  The following could happen....

Retail Price:  $1,000

Number Sold:  1,000

Total Revenue:  $100,00 [$30,000 for Techdirt, $70,000 for 'participants']

Number of Participants:  10 [$7,000 split for participants]

This might create new and interesting topics - no one person is out lots of time/effort, but the backend rewards could be big.  Techdirt gets paid for providing the infrastructure to create the 'participation' and marketing/sales of the papers - participants get paid for their knowledge.

IDEA 3:  A new way to think about cases...

Right now, you have "written" or online cases, which we as participants in the community, can respond.  Why not create teleconference round tables, where callers can "hear" these experts talk about a subject.  The fee charged would be based upon the topic, the number of experts, the length of the call, the ability to ask questions, etc.  Experts could be paid for their time or there could be a revenue split [my personal perference is revenue split, it provides for a bigger upside].

Also, you could provide experts for conference calls to your clients.  In this scenario, the expert gets paid an hourly rate [sometimes set by the expert, other times set by the firm] to "talk" to your client for a pre-determined amount of time [usually and hour] - they ask questions, get answers, very interactive.

So there are three suggestions -- one about website functionality, the other two are about extending the reach/market for the community. 

I find navigating the insight community kind of challenging.  There are the case areas, and the profile page, but the link for messages is on the top bar with more general links.  There should be a landing page that would have the case information like you have it, but give you a look at your in box, and a link to update your profile as well as payment tracking (which doesn't exist at this point).

 I would also be interested in forums for the Insight community.  I can understand how you'd want to keep the topical stuff to the public side and the cases, but I would like something to get a sense of who else is out there doing this, and a way to network and share resources etc, not related to the cases. 

Thanks.