When I compare social media with traditional media in terms of quality, it is much easier and quicker for me to find special information through social media than traditional media. For example, Yahoo! Answers is a new kind of service to find and share information among its users through the Internet. Every user can ask questions on any topic, and then get answers from other real people. Then the original questioner can evaluate the answers. In China we also use a kind of similar service called Baidu Zhidao, it is based upon the biggest website of Chinese search engine Baidu. Because of its huge amount of users, finding and sharing special information among them is feasible. Like the Slashdot, Baidu Zhidao also has its own stimulative mechanism to encourage the users, not only the answerers, but also the questioners. Comparing it with the Slashdot, it uses the points instead of Karma, when the questioner has many points, and he has the high level, and then he can ask questions and set high marks for them. The higher marks the questions have, the quicker the answerers see them and solve them. If someone can provide the best answer, the best answerer can get the corresponding marks to increase his points and improve his level. The best answer is evaluated by the original questioner or voted by other audience. It totally depends on the users, but not editors. It also has some administrators, and they can monitor the behaviors of users and filter the unhealthy and unmoral content. According to my personal experience about the Baidu Zhidao, it is very useful and effective, and in relation to what Benkler writes, it can provide relevance and accreditation as much as possible based on the great amount of users’ opinions and insights.
When I search the authoritative information about my studies, I always use Wikipedia. I think it is a very interesting example of managing the issue of quality in a good way. Because it has specific volunteers to censor and maintain the accreditation of the published content, and it requires creditable reference of the explanation, it provides a kind of new solution to the quality of social media. It tries to balance the power of authority and the masses.
For the relevance of social media, I think YouTube manages this issue very well. When a viewer visits a special video submitted by someone, on the same webpage YouTube provides the related videos, promoted videos and more videos from the same author to the viewer in order to give him more choices automatically, and it can save the viewer’s searching time of similar videos or related videos.
Lusha Wang
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2 comments:
Thank you for telling about the Baidu Zhidao. It think it's very useful too have a service like that. I sometimes try Ask.com, but it was not as useful as I would hope for. They don't seem to have very strong involvement of peer reviews and credibility like Yahoo! Answers.
Before I could find a relevant answer, I needed to put my question in a specific way. I use a dictionary like Thesaurus integrated with Ask.com and sometimes resort to trial and error. Having this way looking at it, I can wish I had a similar service in Swedish.
Having had a look at The Baidu Story, they make a point that the technology used for quality improvements has to take into account the different aspects of the language. How does it work? I suppose there's a lot more to it than just vocabulary. How do the ratings work? Slashdot let the users suggest attitudes corresponding to each grade. They let the words carry values, but they still redefine it as they like. How does that compare to what you use in high-context culture(s)?
It is quite good that Baidu Zhidao has built up an effective mechanism to stimulate both questioners and respondents. This furthers the importance of the user participation in the virtual world of social media. From the perspective of economics, this act has also indicated that it is greatly encouraged that we should positively turn the traditional value consumers into the value creators in the whole value creation chain. This is where the stimulus works on the internet.
To Fredrik, as much as I know, Baidu has their own complete credit system to encourage the respondents to answer questions. No matter you are a questioner or a respondent, you need to register to become a user of Baidu Zhidao first. Respondents can obtain credits by answering the questions, and questioners get the right to rate the answers. Only the best answer rated by the questioner enables the respondent to get credits from the system. Sometimes, if a very hard question was asked or a question needed to be answered in a short time, the questioner even gave their own credits to the respondent who can offer the best answer. Interesting, huh?
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