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! :)