David Usherwood wrote:Quite a few habitues of this forum have posted answers on the Linkedin forum - including you and I
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I haven't, because I'm not on Linked In. Nor am I on Facebook, nor am I on Twitter. I don't care how old fashioned or curmudgeonly it makes me appear, I still hold to the view that it's unwise to put too much of yourself out there on the web lest it come back to bite you. Previously this was the only place on the Internet that I appeared under my own name (there are now two, kinda sorta) though that came about primarily for historical reasons. If I wanted to I could be anonymous here as well, as some of our leading posters are (again, kinda-sorta). And even then to some extent Alan Kirk is as much a character that I play on the Internet as the real me, as per my previous signature about "Sometimes the men don't know when you're acting".
But of more concern to me is that on a site like LinkedIn someone else "owns" the content, and the purpose of the content, as Lotsaram alluded to, is often to boost the owner's business either directly or indirectly. (On a site like this one, no-one, not even the Admins, really "own" the content.
You own what you say, which is also different to the old Cognos site where, as I recall, one of the concerns was that Cognos tried to claim ownership of anything posted.)
Not that I have anything against business or money. I, personally quite like money and wish to have a great deal more of it. Nor do I have an issue with people being paid for the fruits of their labour and it could be argued that some of us already give away a little too much cream.
(You wouldn't believe how this argument can rage in photography forums, though that's an extension of the "art vs commercial" debate that has gone on since Fox-Talbot's first negative came out. People who make their living from nothing but photography are understandably put out by those who offer similar content for very little (via stock photo sites) or nothing, feeling that it destroys the market value of their labour. Conversely those who seem to have a $$$$$$$$ scale just under the exposure compensation scale and see nothing of the art can be looked at as being if not venal, just outright greedy.)
But I do think that if every person's every action was motivated by
nothing more than "what's in it for me" then we cease to have a society and end up with… well, Wall Street, basically. And look how well
that's turned out for the world.
I prefer to make a demarcation between the things I do for money and the things I do for, for want of a better term, community-minded purposes. (Though I grant you that there can be some level of overlap; consultants who post answers in the forum aren't exactly doing their profile any harm which may lead to more business for their firms, but I'm not suggesting that any action has to have either 100% or 0% altruism attached to it.) However that's still why if I put in the time to help someone out I'd rather do it in a place where no-one is trying to turn a buck for themselves off the sweat of my brow. What used to really hack me off back in the days when I was a heavy poster in the Excel Usenet newsgroups was Excel web sites which would aggregate a Usenet feed and then present it as their own "forum", "brought to you by" the particular owner of that site and complete with ads plastered all around and in between the content. The worst offender (which is still around, and still has a reasonable amount of traffic but I grant you is no longer a monument to the undoubted greatness and Excel services of the founder of it) isn't even mentioned in Jon Peltier's article.
Although I've landed on most of them from time to time I'm not sure that I'd particularly be in a rush to join most of the sites mentioned in that article. Most of them, to a greater or lesser extent, were formed to promote the founder's services or textbooks. (I'm prepared to forgive Bill Jelan for the "Mr. Excel" thing even though giving oneself such a title could lead one to being described as an affectation-prone tosser. I suspect that the title wasn't one he bestowed on himself but was probably formulated by his publishers despite the fact that there are at least two other "Mr. Excel"s that I can think of. I'd feel similarly about anyone who branded themselves as "Mr. TM1" aside from Manny Perez who earned the right by writing the thing in the first place.) The only site on the list that I'm a member of is Stack Overflow, which has a pretty clean site design with minimal, relevant ads.
Incidentally, Jon's list could have added "avoid sites which have completely cr*p site design". The Big Resource ("Gettin' Even More Annoying") with your opening of every link in a new window (once you wade your way through the ads plastered all over the page), only to find that there were no answers to the question anyway, I'm lookin' at you.
Lotsaram wrote:It's interesting to read Jon's entire post as to various Excel forum pros and cons, particularly his opinion on the concept of ranking and scoring points for answers and the counter-productive impact this can have
I'm not sure that he was saying that, exactly. The specific criticism that he made about the answerer not wanting to share points is really a function of how Experts Exchange works, specifically about it being a paid site. I don't know whether Jon was aware but apparently some of the "experts" get cash bonuses based on points (nothing like what the owners keep for themselves, I'd wager), so obviously instead of a collegiate atmosphere where the intention is to find the best solution for the OP, you have a "dogs fighting over a bone" one. Frankly I always shuddered when an Experts Exchange link came up in my search results; I've no intention of paying for an answer to a question which is doubtless answered elsewhere, especially as it may not be the answer that I need anyway. I'd like to permanently blacklist the site from my search results and although I've seen articles which suggest that Google was adding an ability for users to do that, I've yet to see it. (You can exclude them from specific searches but that gets old.)
I suspect that when he made the statement that you should look for:
Jon Peltier wrote:Recognized experts: members with designations indicating expertise (but watch out for too much game-like clutter, like badges and medals and point counts).
he was thinking of Stack Overflow on that last point. However on a site of that size they do, for the most part, serve a purpose. For example, the medal on offer for reading every section of the FAQ, or even opening the sodding FAQ, would be useful over here too. (But seriously, that sort of thing would probably be clutter on a site of this size. On a site of Stack Overflow's, they can often be beneficial even though they've probably taken it to something of an extreme over there.)
Overall I agree with the general thrust of his article, and even more with his view of LinkedIn forums.
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