It seems to be an accepted fact that social media sites are powered by an inexactly quantified Creative Minority.  Such people are the lifeblood of communities like Spotstory and we spend a lot of time trying to understand what really motivates such folks.

In that light, I found this post by Dave Winer about his recent attempt to update Wikipedia interesting:

The first [article I edited] was about the MacArthur Maze. It had already been updated to include the outage, I just fixed some typos, and rearranged the words so they flowed better. Then I decided to link to my page of links about the news, expecting that would be reverted in a few days at most as the full story was documented, but it was reverted within minutes, as were all my other edits.

I’ve had the same thing happen to me, not on Wikipedia (or Spotstory!), but on another site where text is collaboratively created.  In my edit, I’d actually only changed a little bit of white space!

In both Dave’s case and my own, the reversion was executed very quickly, without any kind of discussion, and only ”undid change” as commentary.  I suspect, in both situations, the revision was made by a full-time citizen of the community, and not a more casual contributor.

It seems to me the motivation in these cases is owning turf–I’m open to alternative explanations–and in the end that’s pretty anti-social (and not very creative).

I’m sure most people are motivated to contribute by more than one impulse, but I’d still be interested to understand the relative occurrence of each.

How many folks primarily contribute so they’ll have some turf to defend?  Or because they’ve got a passion for the subject matter?  How many because they enjoy being part of a community or feel it’s some kind of social duty? Are many motivated by a sense of accomplishment?  For what portion is it just ego?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

We often get asked why we didn’t seed Spotstory with content from some other source. Certainly, databases with location data are easily obtained and integrated.

I imagine that anyone launching a site that depends on user generated content, or some other sort of social media,  is going to ask themselves this question.  I’m not sure that there is one right answer for everyone’s circumstance, but I can explain how we made our choice.

Pros

Here are a couple of reasons we came up for why we might use seed data.

• Empty sites are no fun We’ve probably all had the experience where we see a site’s launch announcement on TechCrunch or Mashable!, only to find the the site contains only three or four data records (usually someplace in downtown San Francisco.) Seeding with a pre-existing database seems to solve this problem.

This is the big argument for seeding, and, no doubt, for certain services it makes complete sense.

• Scaling You want to make sure your system scales to handle the large datasets (you hope!) you will have some day.

This argument is probably less often voiced, but it should be!  It’s definitely the right thing for everyone to do:  you can use seed data during your development process, and then discard it before you deploy.  You can still keep it around in your development environment.  This is what we do.

Cons

Here are some of the reasons against using seed data.

• The site is still empty anyway We’ve all seen this too: you go to a site, click on a link, or search on a latitude/longitude, or place name and get 1000 results.  You click through them and find … nothing.

Aron and I discussed this at great length when we were getting started.  We’d experienced many sites that were filled with this “empty” data and the sites just felt … empty.  Big certainly, but empty nonetheless.

(I have a lot more to say here, but it’s a tangent to the topic at hand.  I’ll write more about it later, I promise.)

• It’s illegal It’s mechanically easy to access and import data, but do you have the right?

Now, there is a lot of data in Wikipedia that would be appropriate and welcome in Spotstory.  The problem is Wikipedia uses the the GNU Free Documentation License and Spotstory uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License for all text content.  Though these licenses share  the same spirit, they are not the same.

Some might see this as a technicality, but we don’t.  (And, yes, it is a challenge keeping unadulterated Wikipedia content out of Spotstory!)

In the end

In the end, we decided we’d start from scratch, and try to grow as much content as we could before we launched.  We felt it was important that actual people discover and share the Spots.  We thought it best that every Spot have associated with it a person who considered it interesting enough to share with the rest of the community.

Ultimately, this approach seemed most appropriate to the spirit of the site.

We’re based in the Boston area, and we’re happy at this moment to try and build a critical mass of interesting content for this area, and so far it seems to be working out well for us.

But, please, don’t let that keep you from creating Spots in other places! :)

As Matthew mentioned, I was at the Berkman Thursday Meeting on April 12th. I had a great time talking about Spotstory to everyone in attendance.

Thanks to Mike Walsh for the invitation and Erica George for help with some of the logistics.

Extra thanks to everyone who braved the weather on Thursday. From my office window, I watched as the weather cycled through sleet, rain, and maybe a little hail. The Red Sox may have been rained out, but the Berkman Blog Group persevered!

We spent a couple hours today, like everyone else who uses the Google Maps API, trying to understand if this morning’s rollout of KML support and MyMaps was an opportunity or a crisis.

Pundits say the sky is falling.  Others who actually have something at stake (like other people’s money) are saying it’s almost a non-event.  The sky is in its place, but when the The Big G shakes things up in your vicinity, there are going to be some consequences.

So, yes, we use Google Maps on our site, and location-based information is a major part of what we offer on Spotstory.  But honestly, the map, though neat, is not the whole ball of wax.  (In fact, once the novelty of getting a map to display wore off, it became a smaller part of the Spotstory concept, if not in screen real estate.)  The site contains neutral point of view information, personal observations, tagging, photo sharing, comments, social networking, syndication, and more.

But, enough of the brave face.  What’s the real impact of Google Maps’ new features on Spotstory?

First, the good news.  The KML support is a good thing: Google released a better search engine for us today.  Now, we just have to understand how to best take advantage of this for our users.

Then there is MyMaps.  Aron and I often come back to a particular point when discussing Spotstory: if we have great content, a lot of problems are just going to solve themselves.  Today was another one of those discussions.

With MyMaps, Google becomes another place to create and store content.   Will that content end up being extremely useful, MySpacey, or just plain spam?  We’ll see.  Do we wish we didn’t have to add Google to the long list of others competing for that content?  Yes!

Our challenge is the same as it has always been: to attract folks and give them a great community and environment to create Spots (and Tours and Visits.)  Google is keeping us honest.  We have to do things that innovate and add value or we’ll, deservedly, wither and die.

Google Maps is an important piece of many web offerings.  If Google is going to continue to evolve Maps–and why wouldn’t they?–they will undoubtedly overtake and make redundant some of the things others have built on their platform.  It’s our job to stay ahead of them, or find ways to serve audiences too small for them, etc.

So, there is some good, and there is some bad.  Certainly, we’re not hoping for more surprises like today’s, but the truth is that for a tiny company like us (and all companies, I’m sure) there is always something unexpected, negative, unhelpful, or anxiety-inducing to work through!  You work through it.

We had the pleasure last evening of sharing spotstory with The Historical Society of Watertown in Watertown, MA. We’d like to thank the Society for sharing their time with us, and especially Karl H. Neugebauer for making the arrangements.

(Also, Kudos to Aron for figuring out in 30 seconds how to get us on the net via his phone wired to his MacBook wired to my Dell!)

One of the best parts of my spotstory experience has been attending events like these, meeting different people, showing them the site and seeing them get excited by the idea.

If you’re affiliated with a historic society we’d love to come by one of your meetings for a few minutes and show you spotstory. We’re also happy to meet groups interested in social media or location based services. Just drop us a line.