Two distict players in Danish new media, Jubii.dk and Fyens Stifttidende launched genuine collaborative web 2.0 like services this week.
Jubii.dk (Lycos Denmark) opened the Jubii IQ site, that lets users pose specific questions to the Jubii community – and receive answers from other individuals who post responses to the question. Community based knowledge that is.
The Jubii IQ seems to be part of a worldwide Lycos roll-out. The same system seems to be found on German, British and Swedish Lycos-sites. (Though I don’t expect simoultanous translation from one language to another to be part of the setup:-).
Fyens Stiftstidende (a regional Danish newspaper) on the other hand, announced – as the first Danish newspaper – its take-over of a danish blog-company. Fyens Stiftstidende seems allready to have implemented the blogsystem to one of its own websites as the www.xtrablog.dk. They’re not bragging about the xtrablog yet – the system still runs in a test-phase – but has, however, allready been reviewed as “excellent” by my former collegue Kim Elmose, who’d done his own testing (thanks to Kim for the original tip).
The idea of posing questions to a community of experts is not at all new, just to get the record straight, while we wait for Web 2.0. The first project was the now defunkt expertnet, which brought together thousands of experts all over the planet in professional services areas in the early 1990’s. The problem was and still is, the incentive to get experts to divulge their knowledge at no charge to the inquirer. This is still not resolved. In many ways, it is like offering a file sharing platform for knowledge, and we know the experience of the music industry in that regard….
Well, I don¨t think I’ve claimed the Jubii/Lycos thing to be new. All I say is that it’s clearly a collaborative intended service. I presume the global Lycos-launch has something to do with the ongoing “web 2.0-mania” – that Lycos wants to be a part of that as well, and tries out this thing, like they do with personal webpages and their own blogging system.
However there might actually be something new going on here: Not the service itself – but the users. As you say, Edward, a very good question is: will the experts be willing to share their knowledge. But another question is: how many experts do you need to get an answer? What I’m hinting at is, that if there’s only one expert with the right answer, its of cource crucial to get him to deliver. But if a large number of indivuals know the answer, only one of them need to speak up to fullfill the purpose. That is: do we have a “long tail”-curve (longtail.typepad.com) of experts today using the web? And is the curve flat enough?