The thesis of the article is that in telecommunication connectivity is much more important than content delivery.
If you define "important" as "makes money" - yes.
They prove that by presenting numbers on money people spent on using telecommunication media for private information exchange and for viewing/listening/reading content made by professionals. The numbers are convincing – but actually this is quite common sense that the public part of information exchange between humans is just a small fraction of the private information exchange.
This isn't a conclusion you can draw from Odlyzko's paper. He explicitly says (my emphasis):
Still, the argument that “content is not king” that is presented here should not be taken to an extreme. All it says is that most of the money is in point-to-point communication. It does not say that content does not dominate in volume of data. Historically, as we have noted above, content has often dominated, and probably dominates now.
...
The argument of this paper is that the entire content piece of the economy is not all that large, and its contribution to network costs is much smaller than that of point-to-point communication. It does not deal with how the content piece is divided.
...content is used to denote material prepared by professionals to be used by large numbers of people, material such as books, newspapers, movies, or sports events. That is the sense in which it is used in this work.
The paper compares revenue from content production/distribution and revenue from communication. All of perlmonks, both messaging and normal posts would fall into the latter category. Nobody pays money for perlmonks to produce content. It's all about communication between the users. The fact that this communication occurs in a public forum is beside the point (in the context of the paper).
In a healthy society the ratio of private and public communication must be in favor of private. It is the way human societies have been acting for thousands of years.
I'm not sure I agree. I'm not saying that private communication is not necessary, but a healthy society needs to allow free public communication. A society defines itself by its public face.
This quite obvious truth is not used by people trying to build online communities. Perl Monks is not an exception here – although with Emessage System (Chatterbox and private messages) it seems to head in the write direction. I believe the EMessage System should be made more usable.
With my usability hat on I have to disagree. It's not an obvious truth and the hard problem with building online communities is enabling public communication. You can tell from the name that "private" communication isn't about the community.
Private communication is easy. Look how e-mail took off. People always want to talk to people. Taking this communication urge into the public arena where you can create public artifacts that everybody can benefit from - that's the hard bit. If you're interested take a look at the body of work in information science, knowledge management and groupware. Clever people are spending time and money with things like Blogs and Wiki's just because they make public communication simpler.
This is the reason why I ++ed the /msg to author of the node node, and was really disappointed to see it with a –3 reputation (it wasn’t until yesterday that I found the right argument in favor of this new feature).
Remember - node rep doesn't mean a great deal. Everybody has the odd post with negative rep for no obvious reason. Rep also changes given time (and artist's node was running at 11 last time I looked.) Nobody said anything negative about the idea, and some solutions were posted. If it's something you feel strongly about get involved and implement it.
Personally I voted ++ for the node since it would make my very occasional uses of msg slightly simpler. However, you can make an argument for keeping the barrier to private communications high.
Above I presented a general reasoning why I believe we need this kind of functionality at PM – here I will present some more concrete arguments. First I know that technically it is not something really different from typing “/msg author_of_the_node The message …” into the Chatterbox, the difference is only in the comfort of using it. It is obvious that for the "social chitchat" the usage barrier needs to be really low. The most important role of this mechanism would be feedback for the author. It would be a more personal addition to the reputation points. This would free the public from reading the abundance of “me too” messages, while providing the author with the feeling that he has wrote something useful for others.
Are "me to" messages only useful to the author? No - they also let everybody else know the author wrote a good node. That's very useful.
It's like the "problem" of multiple responses to a SOPW post with the same answer. This isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing. It shows that there is a commonly accepted correct solution.
Would making private communication between users easier help perlmonks? Almost certainly not. In fact, the opposite could well occur. Conversations that were previously public and benefited all would become private and benefit the few.
In a community it's the public communication that matters.
In reply to Re: Public and private communication
by adrianh
in thread Public and private communication
by zby
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