Musings on our technological world
Rants, Postulations, Opinions, Commentaries, or just plain noise on the computer orientated and technological world we are increasingly living in.
From AI to advertising to scientific reasoning and bias, anything that takes my fancy really.
Friday 5 January 2007, 10:33 AM
Experts Exchange and Paid Subscriptions
Well, having eaten all the pies and drunk all the wine, I guess Christmas / New Year is well and truly over - as always, it was fun whilst it lasted.
Anyway, back to techie things, I've noticed that Experts Exchange is beta testing a new skin / site layout. On the whole, besides the now well known desire to "glassify" everything, I actually really like the improvements. It seems the pages load a bit slower which is disappointing, but there is more information on offer and it is presented cleanly and easy enough to find your way around.
However, I do notice to my amusement a whole section on gaming. Not many questions in there yet, but I wonder if it will be possible to be labelled a bone-fide MMORPG Guru by Expert Certification. Wouldn't that look good on a CV!
Anyway, light heartedness aside, I noticed Amazon users have reviewed the site (I thought they just reviewed stuff Amazon sold ??) and have given it an enormous drilling for being so "money-orientated". What is it with the modern internet culture that people just think everything should be free? I had a quick go on answering some questions the other day and picked up 2600 points in the day -- that's some 25% the way to a full membership, thus giving me full access for free. If you don't know enough to contribute, you need to support the service in some way, and I can't see why that is unreasonable. Server space is not free, bandwidth is not free, staff moderation time is not free, so why should the service be?
I have built (with a colleague) a turn-based Go site (http://www.online-go.com) which is encountering the same problem. It's great fun to write, fun to play on, great community building up, but it is beginning to be quite a financial strain. The only option is to have memberships (with obvious bonus perks) to support the running of the site - I'd love to offer it for free but my hosts don't want to offer it to me for free, so what do I do?
Personally, I'd rather pay for a service than use it for free and be bombarded with "Free Smilies" and "You are the 1,000,000 visitor" ads, and other wildly annoying popups (even from corporations like IBM?!) that often get plastered everywhere.
For example, I really enjoy ZDNet.co.uk, but as I write I have a "sponsored link" advertised below to "100% Free Gay Teen Dating" (http://www.boy18.co.uk - probably NSFW, I didn't check) -- I have nothing against Gay Teen Dating but why is that next to a tech blog on a tech site? Where exactly is the relevance?
Anyway, am I the only one that feels that users should be prepared for those services that we find to be useful?
PreviousComments on this post
I see your point about having to pay for the servers, but I’ve been participating at EE for some 6 years as an expert and I’m (have been?) the #1 MS Access expert from 2002 till 2007 answering some 7,000 Access questions and posting over 40,000 comments. I was also active as a moderator (modulo and GranMod) for 4 years and posted in that capacity over 100,000 comments.
When you think that such a track record does give you some credit you’re however at the wrong place at EE. I got called names by another member and no action was taken. When I guarded the site from the sometimes crappy comments of this member I got suspended and all links (some 40) in my comments pointing to my page holding previously Access samples and now stating my suspension were removed. (http://www.geocities.com/nico5038/) Finally asking the site owners for an explanation for this suspension gave no response at all.
The new interface will have costed a lot of money, but besides the better looks it doesn’t load faster, doesn’t show the questioner anymore and is another example of the foolish American idea that it’s only the outside that counts.
The new owners have found a way to use innocent volunteers to generate a real cashcow that allows them to run an office with some 15 people and to pay the experts with worthless points that won’t even buy them a cup of Starbucks coffee.
Finally the crappy answered questions (without a real answer and/or with broken links) aren’t getting any attention. The closure of questions, to give the experts their points, has the first priority as that’s what makes them coming back and getting them hooked up.
I’ve found another site www.thescripts.com that’s really for free and that does value experts. It’s growing fast and I meet a lot of old EE collegues there.
Nic;o)
You've brought up two interetsing issues there.
First, I'm glad you enjoy zdnet.co.uk topazg. The sponsored links come straight from Google and I haven't seen the undesirable ones you mentioned but I believe we can add a block to those - I'll check and see what we can do.
To address Nico5038's point, thescripts.com is an impressive site. I'm interested to know whether there are any features you think would be good to implement on ZDNet UK.
Thanks for your response Matt.
I think the basics for a good site is not the amount of technical features, but the team of experts and interest of the admins/moderators for those members.
The admins/moderators from TheScripts are very motivated and do actively interact with the experts. Being member of such a community that teaches new members the way how to act is very valuable and was also the basis of EE in the old days.
So your comment is already showing that you have the right attitude to build ZDnet UK into a successfull site :-)
Regards,
Nic;o)
Yes, fair enough, I am aware that I have little personal experience of the politics at that end and have heard very similar comments from a number of other senior experts on the site that have since left.
My comments were primarily on people's belief that everything on the internet should fundamentally always be free, often without a consideration for the efforts and costs involved in getting the aforesaid information or services in the desired manner.
Thanks for bringing up thescripts.com, I'll check it out and see if I can join on there also ...
@Matt: Yes, to be fair, most of the Google AdSense adverts have been absolutely fine, and despite using the Firefox adblock I always allow AdSense through as I agree with their method of advertising.
It was just amusingly coincidental timing that there was a gay teen dating advert at that time. Now I have system design solutions, a Microsoft "Windows vs Linux" study (oh look, guess what they found!), and an IT consultancy advert.
The site is great really :)
Topazg: The question is, of course, what was on the page you were typing on that made Google Adsense think that gay teen dating would be an appropriate ad? ;-)
A couple of ideas we've been thinking around this include targeting Adnsense ads according to the profile of the (logged-in) person reading the site, so if you indicated in your account that you're interested in security, then you might see security-related ads, whareas someone esle would see something else. We're currently working on a feature that would build a statistical profile of keywords associated with people on the site, depending on what those individuals have written about; this would not only enable us to help people find others who have corresponded about similar issues, but again, could be used to inform the choice of AdSense adverts that appear on the pages they view.
I'll keep you posted on how this work goes. As always, any feedback is welcome.
Haha, yes, I'll watch my content -- perhaps it picked up NSFW!
I like the idea of user tailored advertising based on interest (though no doubt some people will call it invasion of privacy or something), and I'd be interested to see how it goes!
hey guys, you might want to check out our site: www.quomon.com, which is actually inspired by EE, but IMHO easier to use and also adds a few web 2.0 ideas such as tagging and a bit of AJAX.
thescripts.com looks very good and growing quickly, but it doesn't appear to have a point system, which I think makes ranking of experts more precise and adds a bit of motivation to the process.
anyway, i'd be happy to know your thoughts.
David Givoni
Hi David,
The ranking of the experts at EE isn't for their knowledge, but their effort. "Heavy" experts aren't listed higher as the "light" experts.
I've been the #1 in the MS Access topic area for several years and have over 15 years of Access expertise, besides some 30 years as a system developer.
The #2 (capricorn1) has used Access since 2003 (see his profile) and has a hardware background. None the less he's now the #1 for the running year and his comments are showing that he's an excellent "google expert" (lots of unexplained links), very good in filtering "high point" questions and still unaware how boolean logic works when combining AND and OR in a WHERE clause....
So never tell me that the EE point system is a great ranking system. It's only a source of trouble and a way to get experts hooked up.
For the questioners the only thing that counts is to be helped in understandable language and even better when they are taught to solve similar problems the next time themselves as a real expert teaches them to fish instead of giving them a fish :-)
Nic;o)
Agreed, I know just what you mean. It does seem off for someone to get 2000 expert points for a "look at this page: {link}"
It's interesting deciding how far to go though. Here was one of my EE answers earlier this year, where it kind of turned into a basic "project design and implementation for beginners" course:
EE Shift Types Answer
I think this was very useful to him in the end, and I _hope_ he has understandings to apply to future projects, but it could just have been a waste of my time.
