May 20, 2011
1 comment
Why StackExchange is Hotter than Twitter
Seth Godin and Ian Greenleigh propose promoting hashtags with books to facilitate persistent conversations about the books or topics.
This is similar to the experiment I participated in with StackExchange and Rally Dev last week at the RallyOn11 conference. (The idea was to keep the conference conversations going and searchable long-after the conference ended.)
StackExchange is the perfect medium to make this happen. Twitter is dangerously unmoderated for this to work there.
What we’re talking about is knowledge discovery and knowledge creation. The act of people finding knowledge, discussing it and creating new ideas.
Knowledge needs to function in a context to have meaning. This context can be provided by a community -by an audience. This is facilitated by creating ways to categorize knowledge or discussions.
By giving anyone the ability to publish to a hashtag, the knowledge loses context. It becomes highly diluted. Quickly. (Unless, Twitter comes out with a business model where there’s an entrance fee/ a gate to publish to a specific hashtag or to search on a specific hashtag.)
StackExchange has a community that puts knowledge discovery and knowledge creation into a meaningful context. It creates a taxonomy of knowledge and structure to the process of knowledge creation and discovery that is meaningful to the community (and highly findable). And since the privilege of determining that structure is based on participation in the community, it is theoretically open to all. (Shades of Wikipedia but with fewer barriers to entry into the editors club.)
What’s more, by providing structure and clear rules of participation, StackExchange has a built in revenue model waiting to burst: offering knowledge-process management services to organizations that value it. Like pharmaceutical companies, healthcare, telecom or aerospace, places where innovation carries huge multiples.
Longer term, unstructured conversations will become just more noise and meaningful conversations, conversations in context, will gain value. This is the challenge for Twitter, turning audience into power. This is where StackExchange currently has the lead.
UPDATE: Let me know if you have any questions on using StackExchange for your organization, particularly the project management or programmers site.
