Interactive Whiteboard

I'd say only semi-trusted. And, actually, it *doesn't* have tight editorial control. They've automated removal of the more obvious kinds of vandalism, but an article stays clean only because somebody has decided to watch it. The more popular and controversial topics receive a lot of scrutiny, because they have a lot of watchers. But if you went and substituted "Lisa Thorell" for "Cleopatra" in my

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryph%C3%A9

... well ... I doubt anyone would pick up on it for weeks. It's not even on MY watchlist, even though I wrote it.

"Thank goodness Wikipedia filters this out. If only these standards were more commonplace...."

That's a tough one. It involves moderating user-generated content with what Clay Shirky called "rules for losing":

http://crookedtimber.org/2008/07/03/literature-recommendations-for-mediated-governance/

In Wikipedia editing wars, discussion drags on for a while, Shirky's Tyranny of One (there's always one), but then the debate often gets escalated to Older and Wiser Heads. The resulting adjudication is sometimes only good for a laugh or two, or three, or ... uh-oh, several hundred -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

but it short-circuits the Individual Tyranny problem in most cases. And sometimes it moves lightning fast. Not long ago, I was getting egregiously harassed by an editor who finally made the fatal error of insinuating a legal threat against me. (Check out Yakushima's user page; yes, I'm identifiable in the real world, so it's serious.) Here's how that one ended up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Oz_Waver

That issue got taken up before I even quite realized he'd threatened me. OMFG, guardian angels circling over Wikipedia editor debates!?

How do you get this effect in other media without making all media Wikipedia? I thought about it for a long time, and the best I could come up with was this:

http://marccooper.com/rather-obnoxious/#comment-7652

Which I admit is still not very good. But the exchange here has been productive. I realize now: for that idea to work, the real "truth-engine pistons" of such a system must work to build their brands within a community of filterers. And they won't do that unless they have a way to establish a brand in the first place. That's a Wiki Pattern

http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns

that can apply outside wikis.

But unlike Wikipedia, a trusted brand, with tight editorial control, Weingarten's malais concerns the unfortunate infestation within the Personal Branding movement of the self-promoting "blowhards" (as you put) . Unfortunately, unlike Wikipedia, much user generated content (including even some of the online news sites) are not tightly controlled for " accuracy, fairness and credibility", but remain highly self-promotional. One of the commenters to Weingarten's post echoed his vexations really well by citing Maureen Tkacik's piece, Look at me! A writer's search for journalism in an age of branding. http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/look_at_me.php?page...That piece captures brilliantly one young journalism's travails of seeking the "accuracy, fairness and credibiity" of professional journalism and instead encountering one self-promoting publishing entity after another. Thank goodness Wikipedia filters this out. If only these standards were more commonplace.

Yes. Consider a little "branding" universe: Wikipedia. I contribute a lot on Wikipedia, from punctuation fixes to whole articles. (I take inordinate pride in the little ones I've written, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryph%C3%A9). Youngman's comment says something about Wikipedia, and how it "built its brand" with "user generated content". Wikipedia works not because it's a brand, but rather (at least in part) because of thousands of "personal brandings" that happened (and keep happening) inside it that inextricably tied to demonstrable individual competence.

We all know Wikipedia's flaws, which are legion. But because it has evolved a mechanism for converging on "accuracy, fairness and credibility" (haltingly, and never fully, I admit), it's often reasonably informative, and so we all use it. That mechanism is a system of government-by-contributors in which administrative clout can be accumulated by developing a personal history of being accurate, fair and credible. Because Wikipedia records everything you do to it, there's a trail of evidence for backing up your claims of being accurate, fair and credible - and gaining power within the editing system requires that you make such claims to your peers and your betters (even if the claims are largely tacit) and be able to back them up. It's not perfect, but by and large it works.

"Branding" in Wikipedia is pretty interesting, especially in how minimal it is - you have a sig, that's all. Some contributors lavish a lot of attention on their sigs, making them very distinctive, with eye-catching colors and fantastic fonts. (Such flamboyance is not necessarily a sign of idiocy, since it requires nontrivial knowledge of arcane markup to achieve some of the more vivid effects.) And, of course, if you contribute anonymously, as most do (or if you can't use your real name because someone else has already taken it), the handle you choose is part of your "brand design." But wherever contributors themselves are worse-than-useless blowhards or disruptive, the sig marking their comments and their edit summaries just becomes a red flag to other contributors, it becomes "anti-branding" - a very effective self-corrective feedback effect in a project that ostensibly welcomes all comers, but that also strives for accuracy, fairness and credibility.

As most product marketing folks know, price hikes on existing product are a tactic used to migrate customers off old platforms. This is undoubtedly part of the strategy here, as NetFlix ultimately envisions a pure cloud-based streaming world, free of the DVD stuffing, transport costs and delays.But it puts many customers in the position of choosing: DVD or Streaming? And the inventory (and good grief, performance!) of the streaming product doesn't compare.

But, to your point, there is now little doubt that NetFlix PR executed this poorly. My post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek about this, but rather direct in the end.

In any subscription model, you have several levels of subscribers, two of which are the price-conscious, and the people who barely notice the charge. The people who barely notice the charges will stay with you forever, as long as the 1st group doesn't alert them to the fact that they're not getting value for their money.

I'm value-conscious rather than price-conscious, so I'm in the second group. And I'm starting to wonder if I need Netflix. I rarely use it and can get what I need from them elsewhere in services I already pay for. If they'd rolled out this price hike in a way that addressed the upcoming value increase, I would never be considering unsubscribing.

My plan would only go up $1 actually, so I'm not affected. But because I think it's an unfair price at its current offering, it makes me wonder if they'll be unfair to me in the future. Which makes me question if I want to stay with them, etc. etc.

So maybe my angry pitch-fork is premature. I would go as far as to say probably. That doesn't mean they won't needlessly lose me as a customer, just because I'm now aware that I don't need them. And I'm hardly an isolated case.