I don't define important as making money - but money is an indicator of importance.

I know. However, the paper was discussing the economic viability of funding from the commercial content industries (film, music, etc.) It wasn't judging the relative importance or worth of public vs private communication. It doesn't discuss that distinction.

In your OP you said:

The thesis of the article is that in telecommunication connectivity is much more important than content delivery

and that's only true if you define "important" as "makes more money".

I don't write here a scientific article - so I feel, I can be a bit less rigorous that the cited Oldyzko paper.

Fair enough, but your OP drew a conclusion from evidence that wasn't in the paper. For some reason this tends to annoy academics :-)

The paper doesn't compare public and private communication - it compares commercially produced content and everything else.

In the Oldyzko paper they define what is public and what is private communication by some attributes of it – this is just a technique used to simplify the arguments.

Once again - the paper does not comparing private and public communication. It is very explicitly discussing the revenues from commercially produced content. Non commercial content can still be public (the content on perlmonks being an example).

I believe everybody would agree with me that public is what is exposed to general view

Indeed. Unfortunately, since Oldyzko's paper didn't separate public and private communication funding I don't see how you can draw conclusions about public and private communication from it.

All I wanted to demonstrate is that the private communication is an undervalued part of the machinery.

Please do. I've not seen any evidence so far :-)

In my personal experience, and from everything I've read, the problems of building useful communities are in the creation of good public artifacts. The problem people find is that private communication is overrated and public communication is underrated.

I feel that the general attitude here at PM is that every piece of information has some positive value

I don't think this is true. Perlmonks' reputation system is built around judging the worth of a nodes content and authors contributions.

I'm not arguing against artist's suggestion. I quite like it, the majority of those who can be bothered to vote agree, and there are some suggestions on how the feature can be implemented on the client side.

However the idea that private communication in an online community is more important that public communication is flatly contradicted by my personal experience in helping develop online communities, and by every piece of research I've read on the matter.

Oldyzko's paper doesn't discuss the distinction between public and private communication so can't be used to argue the issue either way.

In reply to Re^3: Public and private communication by adrianh
in thread Public and private communication by zby

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