Blogs and Expertise

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked a ques­tion I could not answer: “How do you main­tain such a high level of exper­tise on so many sub­jects?” It seemed like a ridicu­lous ques­tion as I never really con­sid­ered myself an expert on that many sub­jects. Sure, I do know a few things about a lot of sub­jects but I never thought of it as exper­tise. After sev­eral days of won­der­ing about the ques­tion, I think I finally have an answer.

Before mov­ing on, let me state that I do not con­sider myself an expert on that many sub­ject. For exam­ple, I can prob­a­bly talk about the intri­ca­cies of XHTML and WAI but I do not con­sider myself an expert in those areas as far as I see it: I do under­stand the spec­i­fi­ca­tions, do know how to imple­ment them, and know what most hard­core geeks would know about them. Because of the peo­ple I sur­round myself with (my social net­work (more on that later)), I con­sider myself lit­er­ate in the sub­ject but would defer to other peo­ple if look­ing for true expertise.

What’s exper­tise?

Dictionary.com says that an an expert is

A per­son with a high degree of skill in or knowl­edge of a cer­tain subject

. Under that def­i­n­i­tion, an expert could gen­er­ally be seen as some­one who knows more than the aver­age per­son about a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. So, in order to be an expert, one has to be on top of a sub­ject and, if that sub­ject evolves, on top of changes in that field or sub­ject. Such a def­i­n­i­tion seems to point to the need for proper infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing and the cre­ation of a con­tin­u­ous loop to keep on top of data. So the ques­tion then becomes “How do you get infor­ma­tion about dif­fer­ent sub­jects and stay on top of lat­est devel­op­ments in those sub­ject areas?”. To answer this, one must ana­lyze the pat­terns of infor­ma­tion he/she processes and define sources.

Infor­ma­tion gathering

On a day to day basis, we are recep­tors for a lot of infor­ma­tion. For exam­ple, I get my point­ers from print pub­li­ca­tions, radio, books, weblogs, news sites, email lists, per­sonal email mes­sages, and RSS feed on a daily basis. I rarely watch tele­vi­sion as the broad­cast model is one that often dis­turb me (it does too in terms of radio) because it requires that I be in a par­tic­u­lar loca­tion at a par­tic­u­lar time in order to catch a pro­gram. PVR sys­tem like Tivo are inter­est­ing in that they allow for some level of time-shifting but I’m find­ing that as far as return on time invest­ment, video does lit­tle com­pared to text. As a result, I am liv­ing in a world where text is king, mostly com­ing to me in the form of dig­i­tal bits going through my browser.

My infor­ma­tion tools are rel­a­tively simple:

• Email: I use sev­eral email clients through­out my day, rang­ing from browser-based clients like the one offered by Spam­cop to the one avail­able on my Treo, to the one avail­able on my com­put­ers. Impor­tant to me in terms of email is the abil­ity to sort mes­sages by threads so I can fol­low the pro­gres­sion of dis­cus­sions at a glance, a very use­ful fea­ture if you are deal­ing with sev­eral hun­dred pieces of email daily.
• Aggre­ga­tor: For the longest time, I went back and forth on RSS aggre­ga­tors as I find most of them to be lack­ing in some way or other. Most of my prob­lem arose from the sim­ple con­cept of syn­chro­niz­ing data. Tools like Radio User­land and Net News Wire are great if you are using a sin­gle com­put­ing device through­out the day but fail if you are switch­ing back and forth between mul­ti­ple ones. As a result, I’ve now set­tled on Blog­lines, a great web-based aggre­ga­tor that allows me to keep all my feeds orga­nized in dif­fer­ent fold­ers and keeps me up on changes across all of the feed. This has been a huge time-saver, prob­a­bly cut­ting 3–4 hours out of my daily rou­tine of look­ing for new information.
• Instant Mes­sag­ing: I have yet to find a solu­tion that actu­ally works well in terms of instant mes­sag­ing as I have prob­lems find­ing a solu­tion that could work on my work com­puter, home com­puter, and mobile device (yes, my Treo is part of what I con­sider the infor­ma­tion uni­verse I live in). What I would look for is some­thing that would allow me to recall any con­ver­sa­tion I’ve had in IM and search all that data. For now, I still con­sider IM to be a black hole in my infor­ma­tion universe.

Those tools, how­ever, form the basis of what I call the infor­ma­tion uni­verse. They are, if you want, the plumb­ing that allows me to get my info.

Social Net­works and Expertise

Step two in ana­lyz­ing my infor­ma­tion diet is to fig­ure out what the sources are. The tools I listed above are great in an of them­selves but com­pletely use­less if no traf­fic goes into them. This is where social net­works tie in. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to meet a num­ber of very smart peo­ple at dif­fer­ent Inter­net con­fer­ences. Those peo­ple now rep­re­sent the first rung on my social net­work when it comes to tech­nol­ogy. Talk­ing with them over email and IM, I can now get a good idea as to what they are up to, what they con­sider impor­tant, and what they see as issues com­ing up over the hori­zons. Weblogs, how­ever, are going one step fur­ther, allow­ing me in some way to extend my social network.

Blogs and expertise

Because blogs are largely based on con­ver­sa­tions, they increase the level of inter­ac­tiv­ity one has with inter­est­ing peo­ple. Using the plumb­ing pro­vided by RSS (Thanks to the efforts of peo­ple like Dave Winer), one can get a good idea as to what’s going on in the blo­gos­phere. With ser­vices like Tech­no­rati, peo­ple can track who is hot in the blo­gos­phere. With ser­vices like Blogdex,Day­pop, and Popdex, one can track what is hot in the blogosphere.

What those ser­vices allow you to do is basi­cally mine the col­lec­tive minds of thou­sands of blog­gers and, much in the same way Google has used PageR­ank to fig­ure what were the best URLs for a given key­words or set of key­words are, fig­ur­ing out what peo­ple are talk­ing about. While Clay Shirky may argue that the power laws dis­tort those results, one could argue that look­ing at the sourc­ing of links is often as inter­est­ing as look­ing at what links are pointed to. From there, one can find some inter­est­ing com­men­tary. Because of the ease of use of RSS aggre­ga­tors, one can then try out a new com­men­ta­tor for a few hours, days, weeks and then decide whether that per­son is worth following.

So what does this have to do with exper­tise, you might start ask­ing. Well, for starters, I’ve gone through and iden­ti­fied a few peo­ple who are con­sid­ered inter­est­ing by the blog world (ie. the blogerati). Those peo­ple in turns can turn you on to other peo­ple who cover sim­i­lar top­ics. For exam­ple, a big thing in the blog space is polit­i­cal blogs. I per­son­ally don’t care that much for them so those blogs are not among the ones I read. How­ever, I do read a fair amount about tech­ni­cal issues and some of the peo­ple I read do speak about the inter­sec­tion of pol­i­tics and tech­nol­ogy, a sub­ject that does inter­est me. Over time, I have devel­oped a list of blog­gers I do read fre­quently, peo­ple whom I trust as experts on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. For exam­ple, I read Adrian Holovaty’s blog to get a bet­ter idea of what good news­pa­per sites are doing, and I read Alan Reiter’s blog to get info on devel­op­ment in wire­less. Because of read­ing those two blogs, my knowl­edge on two very nar­row fields is increased. And because I use an aggre­ga­tor, I get noti­fied only when changes are hap­pen­ing to their sites.

Blogs and new experts

Sim­i­larly, when a new sub­ject crops up, I first do a Google search but, more and more often, I now also do a Feed­ster search in an attempt to get more con­text. The secret sauce in all of this is RSS, a small easy to use pro­to­col that sits at the core of the weblog world. Where it not for this tool, I would still have to visit sites one by one and go through thou­sands of Google pages to find the proper page. Because blogs are based largely on link­ing and com­ment­ing on links, the blog worlds pro­vides me with some con­text about a par­tic­u­lar link. This, in turns, allows me to more quickly grasps new concepts.

I am not alone in this. This kind of con­cept sits at the core of what the blog world is about. Because blogs gen­er­ate con­ver­sa­tion amongst blog­gers, pock­ets of exper­tise are aris­ing. The mass media are now being sur­prised by the rise of peo­ple who are mov­ing from blogs to main­stream media but shouldn’t be. After all, the deep secret of many in tra­di­tional media is that exper­tise is some­thing that one acquires over time by cov­er­ing a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. The links one makes with sources are estab­lished by doing story after story in a par­tic­u­lar area of exper­tise. That’s exactly what blog­gers are now doing and that is why blogs are rep­re­sent­ing such a rev­o­lu­tion­ary thing in infor­ma­tion dis­per­sal and in exper­tise building.