Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web: Lessons for Enterprise 2.0
by Bill Ives
CNN offered an interesting article, Why commercial Wikis don’t work: Crowdsourcing has been a giant hit for the Web 2.0 set — so why won’t it work for bigger, more mainstream enterprises? It covers some successes and failures in group content creation. The main point can be summed up in this excerpt.
“…Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Flickr organize people into literally millions of accessible walled gardens. Each one allows you to take part in tending the growth of that tiny space — that encyclopedia entry, that Flickr “tag. By tirelessly nurturing their specific communities, not by randomly “crowdsourcing,” Wales, Butterfield, Fake and their ilk encourage responsible gardening. Wiki novels, Wiki op-eds, a Wiki Amazon: these are concepts too large, too uncontrolled, too wilderness-like - too unwalled - to be gardens. Either nothing grows at all there, or the good ideas get strangled by weeds.”
So foster very focused content creation and stay away from trying to do too broad and ill defined a topic like writing a group novel on the web. Success can come on a focused site or on a site that promotes and support multiple niche content areas like the Wikipedia. The article gives a nice niche example, the Lostpedia, “a Wikipedia-like site created by fans of the ABC series Lost who are all trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and sharing their notes.”
This also applies within the Enterprise. One example of success is the Intelpedia operating inside the Intel firewall to collect definitions of key work related concepts. Here you get many people focused on specific subsets of content. There have been over 9,000 entries. This is much better than a broad wiki for simply discussing company issues.
There is also the Intelipedia for the US intelligence community. The “top secret” Intelipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17 (2006)” Both of these applications follow the successful approach of the wikipedia, allowing for niche content creation that is maintained by dedicated users.
