Michael Fogus talks about his increased impedance mismatch with regard to the Hacker News community]. Granted, communities become predictable, and which is why, predictably, I found his post via Hacker News.
I would tend to agree with his takeways:
Great commentators transcend context. Individuals are where its at.
Intuitively, this makes sense because, if you respect someone, you tend to weigh their opinions more, especially in contexts that are adjacent, or with occupational overlap. This is true for the spectrum of users and topics on Hacker News.
He also describes how he follows comments from selected Hacker News commentators. That is an interesting subset of what led me to write a Hacker News Bot. In my case, I wanted to surface postings and links to which interesting people contributed comments.
I came across an even more intriguing example of following great commentators. Marshall Kirkpatrick, in responding to Twitter’s acquisition of Backtype, describes how he used Backtype features to monitor and be alerted to blogosphere comments by a select list of people.
Focusing on people comes naturally to us. However, when a medium other than air is interposed between us, we get stuck in the peculiarities of the media. Compare a conversation in a coffee shop with the discussion during a phone conference or corresponding through letters. And this is just through person-to-person media; broadcast or narrowcast media bring their own twists.
Even in the case of the people-following experience that is Twitter, the mechanics of following, the psychology of follower counts and side-effects in terms of influence scores can skew - if not dominate - the interactions.
So, what Marshall and Fogus are doing here is, in my opinion, a purer use case. Its reaching out, not strutting about.
They also exemplify two broad strategies in listening. One is to be selective, the other is to try and be more aware. One gets you fewer but more interesting links to read, the other (with some work) lets you stay up to date and be in the know. Both are tuning in to people, one is focused on a narrow channel, the other is monitoring a broad spectrum.
How do you build a service that best combines these intents and strategies? How would you use it? What features would you want?
Let us know.
Stay posted on stories, trends and topics of interest.