SpokenWord.org Sanity Check

[Doug Kaye]

(Apologies to those on this list who are also on our Board of Advisors for the duplicate message.)

Did you wake up this morning and ask yourself, "I wonder what's happening at SpokenWord.org."?

No? Well, it's true that I haven't communicated via our Strategy list for some time, but now I really need your help. We're about to dive into the development of SpokenWord.org 2.0, and I'm having typical (and healthy) second thoughts. I'm so deep into the technology, that I'm no longer able to judge whether the concept is worthwhile. This is where you come in. 

The plan for SpokenWord.org 2.0 is to emphasize human curation in the presentation and organization of spoken-word audio and video programs. We'll have thousands of curators creating collections on as many topics. Our editors will curate the curators, and present the very best on our homepage. But you'll be able to find all of the curations and therefore the best spoken-word programs on any topic. But is it worth doing? Can we attract enough curators? And even if we can, will we increase the value of SpokenWord.org enough that a substantial number of new users will find it valuable?

I don't need your encouragement. What I need is your honest appraisal.

Should we continue down this human-curation path, or are we better off focusing our efforts on (a) APIs, or (b) just making the existing site easier to use and less confusing?

Thanks as always.

    ...doug

Doug Kaye, Executive Director

The Conversations Network 

A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit

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[Thilo Planz]

> Did you wake up this morning and ask yourself, "I wonder what's happening at
> SpokenWord.org."?

Not quite, but almost.
Every day before syncing my iPod I check the recent votes on Spokenword.
Unfortunately, there are only a handful (literally) regular voters,
so sometimes a couple of days go by without any new content,
but still, I do discover great content that way.

> The plan for SpokenWord.org 2.0 is to emphasize human curation in the
> presentation and organization of spoken-word audio and video programs. We'll
> have thousands of curators creating collections on as many topics.

Where do you get thousands of curators from?
I read this statement as "emphasize creation of collections and giving
out star ratings on our web site, so that most of our regular users will
in effect be curators".

Is that much different from the previous strategy?

> Our
> editors will curate the curators, and present the very best on our homepage.

Maybe having the homepage manually edited would be good, especially in
the current absence of the thousands of curators.

But that could be a lot of work. You'd want to have small articles about
each pick, I guess. Maybe something like the lists that are so popular
on digg ("Top Ten Horror Audio Short-Stories", "Five Must-Listen Video
Game Podcasts").

For a start, you could maybe just have a featured collection which you
(or your editors) rotate every few days.

> Should we continue down this human-curation path, or are we better off
> focusing our efforts on (a) APIs, or (b) just making the existing site
> easier to use and less confusing?

I think a redesign of the site might be in order.

Unfortunately, I am too "deep into technology" that I cannot offer
suggestions about usability and how to make it more appealing.
It does seem "over-stuffed".

As a simple first step on the "human-curation path", this could
include showing a featured collection.

Any curators will have to emerge from the active user base, I believe,
so the important thing would be to a) grow the user base, and b) engage
your regulars to do more (vote/collect/comment/tag/edit).

Not sure how helpful that all was,

Thilo

PS:

A big problem you might have is that podcast listening (at least for
me), takes place away from the computer, and sometimes days or weeks
after having added it to my queue on Spokenword. I make sure I go back
to vote, but that is an extra effort I have to make. Contrast this to a
blog or forum site, where I read the featured article (look at the
picture, watch the short video clip) and still have the page open to
immediately engage in the discussion.

Also, podcast acquisition is largely automated via RSS feeds, so that
after you have set up your feeds, you basically never need to go back to
a web site.

I have no idea how to solve this, short of integrating with the media
player apps on the devices.

PPS:
How many users does Spokenword have?
How many used it in the last month?
How many clicked on collect or vote?

[Doug Kaye]

A quick response to Thilo's excellent post...

Thilo, your perspectives very closely match mine in everything you wrote. 

The original idea of collections (what we hoped would be the cornerstone of SpokenWord.org) is that they would be for sharing with others. In fact, the vast majority of collections are never shared. They are created and exist only for the convenience of their owners. 

Part of the problem is the lack of motivation to share. The new idea might solve that. As you suggest, we would feature individual's collections on the home page: not just according to the person's name but based on topic. So the home page would offer curated collections on all sorts of topics. The selection of those topics an collections would be done by our editorial staff, but the collections themselves (like now) could be created by anyone. The theory is that if there's a chance for a collection to be featured, there's more motivation for users to create and maintain those collections. Will that work? I don't know yet. But it will certainly work better than the current model.

As far as ratings and voters, your explanation is again correct. We have very few ratings because so much of the listening occurs away from the site. We've tried a few experiments with iTunes integration, but they didn't work for a variety of reasons. I'm not going to expect much from ratings in the future, although I think the rating of curations/collections as opposed to programs may increase.

As for the statistics, you can see some of them at the bottom of the right-hand column on the homepage.

   ...doug

[Ken Kennedy]

I think featuring collections on the home page is an excellent idea; it may taken some human curation to find those that are really interesting, but I think it's worth it.

As for ratings, I'm REALLY wanting to do this...I'm (yet again!) reorganizing some of my collections to try and make this easier. As you've mentioned before, Doug, I think that the db of ratings (of programs, feeds, collections, whatever) is ultimately the most valuable asset of SpokenWord; the site could probably use some re-org, but robust APIs might allow us to end-run that, giving people the ability to rate "from anywhere". Ideally, something like last.fm "scrobbling" would be awesome...that API is accessed by most of the main streaming music sites, many media players, etc. Last.fm provides the listening history backend for many music sites and apps...Spokenword could certainly aspire to the same position for podcasting!

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[Doug Kaye]

So where are you with your own ratings work, Ken? Are you waiting for
something in the APIs?

...doug

[Ken Kennedy]

I'm actually getting back into the API after a hiatus (hello, real life! *grin*)...for now, I'm poking things into the db manually, just to get back into the flow. I think the APIs have what I need, but once I have a good manual workflow down, I'll start to translate that into API-speak and see what we get!