DialedIn Portland

I’ve been looking for a way to kick off the articles here at DI, to help me shape the voice of the site and give potential contributors & readers something to hold onto. So let’s go!

First things to know: this is Portland, and while we’ve got a burgeoning creative & tech community doing just about anything you can think of, we all decided to live here instead of SF, NYC, LA, Seattle, etc. It’s a quality of life thing, the space to breathe and think and be the kind of person you always wanted to be. There is a litany of things that we value here more than money — and that’s a good thing. In fact, it may be our single most important defining characteristic.

The benefit of all this freedom is that an amazing array of talented people, pursuing their dreams, fascinations, and obsessions with a verve and dedication you don’t usually find outside of say, the well-heeled and VC-funded Bay Area.

Expect great things from your community, Portlanders. There is a passion and sense of community here that most cities do not share.

You are here, dear reader, I hope because you want to get a better sense of what’s going on in our community — the designers, developers, agencies, freelancers, and more — I know I do. There’s tremendous change going on around here as Portland’s profile rises. Many new people and companies are arriving all the time. This again is a good thing.

I hope we can have a little fun exploring our little corner of the world, and perhaps demystify it for those who have to spend their days away from the wonderment of the Intertubes.

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Take a look around, sign up and create a directory profile, and let us know about any bugs you find. I’ve already built another version of this directory app for a friend, but there’s still tons that could be added.

Your feedback helps improve the site, so have at it! :)

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Google steps into the UGC ring and everyone (rightly) steps up  and takes notice.

Knols Project: Google Experimenting With User Generated Encyclopedic Pages

Seems clear that Google’s got growth on its mind, and in an Adsense world, that means more pageviews. Knols will certainly fit that bill.

But comparing Knols to Wikipedia seems wrong to me. By asserting authorship, it doesn’t seem that Knols will be an effective crowdsourcer.  Wikipedia is great because it is, at its heart, a collaborative effort — anyone can edit anything. Once you have authors, however, you write alone.

There’s certainly an interest in social networking and online identity these days, but crowdsourcing sits at the other end of the spectrum, where it’s not the individual that matters so much as the community.

We’ve seen many early experiments with collaborative storytelling that essentially string together many authors like frames in a film. What Wikipedia did was mash everyone’s contributions together — and you know what? It worked. People got it, they liked it. It spurred them to higher quality, since that’s all that keeps your contributions on the site.

Knols seems tied to authorship given the draw of money. If they could somehow keep the earning potential while removing the limitations of traditional authorship, they might actually have something.

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