This is Drew Meyers from Zillow commenting on a post last week:
Please note the real estate guide (which is a wiki) is VERY different than a blog. Since wikis are collaborative, no one person “owns” any of the content.
That turns out to be not quite true.
Zillow Blog featured two of my wiki contributions yesterday. Both had been clobbered, if that’s the past tense of collaboration. No mention of me in the idyllic land of wiki, even though both ideas are very good — and no one at Zillow came up with them. Even so, guess who was promoted in the wacky world of no-one-owns-a-wiki.
Oh, yes, Zillow.com happily promotes itself on the sweat of my labor. What genius! Who ever thought of such things? That Zillow, boy howdy!, you gotta get up purty damn early…
Nice. They stand on the shoulders of giants. They just bury them in dirt so it looks like a hilltop. To top it all off, guess who’s going to profit from the inbound links?
Here are the unmolested — er, un-wiki-perfected — original articles, if that matters:
- The best time to list your house: Thursday mornings
(We actually do this on Friday early morning now, but Zillow had no way of knowing that.) - Strategy, timing is everything in making home offer
(And as good an idea as this is, almost nobody ever does it.)
I think this is a good example of how Zillow’s hoped for social networking scheme is self-defeating. It’s understandable that they would want to keep their pseudo-encyclopedia free of spamvertising. This they could achieve simply by accepting or rejecting submissions. But my only incentive for coming up with and sharing good real estate ideas is to promote my own name, brand and image. Why would I do that if I know that my hard work is going to be expropriated?
This is just dumb on Zillow’s part. I’ll have a lot more ideas. But I won’t be sharing them with Zillow.com and it’s sticky-fingered wiki. I think Wikipedia is an amazing accomplishment, but I don’t care what Jimbo Wales thinks a wiki should be like over there. I don’t write for Wikipedia. I care a great deal that people over here would presume to alter my writing and then claim it as their own — and then profit by it at my expense — which is what Zillow is doing in naked essence.
I’ve put a total of six articles in the Zillow wiki, and, so far, three of them have been used to promote Zillow.com at my expense.
Guess how many more articles I’ll be submitting?
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
Jeff Brown says:
Greg – You know them over there. Is this arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, or some combination?
July 19, 2007 — 9:08 am
Greg Swann says:
> Is this arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, or some combination?
My guess would be thoughtlessness, the failure to have thought.
“In the abstract, a wiki is ownerless, therefore our wiki should be ownerless.” There is no special reason to have organized this content as a wiki, but if you are appealing to commercial interests in behalf of another commercial interest (what the MBAs call “partnering”), then you jettison the idea of “ownerless.” No owners, no commerce.
Bottom line: No one thought it through.
July 19, 2007 — 9:16 am
Jeff Brown says:
>Bottom line: No one thought it through.
Grandma told me that’s one of the ways we can spot folks who aren’t the brightest stars in the galaxy. 🙂
July 19, 2007 — 9:24 am
Poppy Dinsey says:
Greg, I feel terrible. I wrote that Zoomf blog and gave all those nice hyperlinks to Zillow.
I’m going home now…..but first thing 2morro I will be editing the blog to link to yours..as you were clearly the man behind the wiki 😉
July 19, 2007 — 9:47 am
Mike Carter says:
Greg- very interesting feedback on the Zillow wiki product. At Zoomf we are planning to have similar products to help the UK property space. It’s nice to know about the things we shouldn’t do! 🙂
July 19, 2007 — 9:58 am
David G from Zillow.com says:
Hi Greg,
I am so sorry. Both of those wiki articles were largely contributed by yourself and should have been attributed to you when we blogged about them. We are publishing an update – please accept our genuine apology.
July 19, 2007 — 9:59 am
Greg Swann says:
> Grandma told me that’s one of the ways we can spot folks who aren’t the brightest stars in the galaxy.
Jeez, I thought I was rough! 😉
Now that they know they have a problem, I’ll bet they’re smart enough to get it fixed. The Realty.bots are all ham-handed and club-footed, but at Zillow they take the Cluetrain to work.
July 19, 2007 — 10:01 am
Greg Swann says:
> Both of those wiki articles were largely contributed by yourself
Where largely consists of about 130% for what’s left of one of them. 😉
> We are publishing an update – please accept our genuine apology.
That’s very nice, but you have to fix the underlying philosophical problem. The people you are appealing to for contributions are not working for the love of wikis. No pro-quo, no quid. It doesn’t matter what wikis are in the abstract or what you might want them to be, what you have will not work with the talent pool you are appealing to.
July 19, 2007 — 10:05 am
Jeff Brown says:
>Jeez, I thought I was rough!
Grandma was the toughest minded, fairest, sweetest, most tolerant person I every knew. Right was right, and wrong was wrong – and you better know the difference. 🙂
When you look up Salt of the Earth, her picture is used. 🙂
July 19, 2007 — 10:08 am
Greg Swann says:
To the men from Zoomf: Good on ya! Very clean design. I like the “we’ll figure it out” type-a-location box. The blog is fun, too. I’ve subscribed.
July 19, 2007 — 10:11 am
Galen says:
I thought both of those stories were very familiar. Title your next entry: “how to find the best Zillow wiki entries before they even exist: read the BloodHound Blog.”
July 19, 2007 — 10:23 am
David G from Zillow.com says:
Update is posted. We are SORRY.
As a team, we’re learning as we’re transitioning from publisher to community. It’s a lot of fun but there are changes in our behavior that must follow and many challenges in creating the perfect forum for all of our members. Please keep the feedback coming. We are committed to creating a great site for showcasing YOUR EXPERTISE.
Greg – you’ve misunderstood the change we made. And our experience is that you are wrong about the participation needed to create an objective reference like Zillow’s Real Estate Guide. I know you understand the value of collaboratively authoring canonical information, so frankly, I’m a bit surprised. I hope I can better explain what we’re trying to achieve.
First, regarding the recent changes to the wiki, please note that we have not removed attribution. You can still see all contributions to any wiki article in its History and we’ve added the ability to compare those contributions side-by-side. Your articles are still attributed to your Zillow profile. Your profile on Zillow will increasingly become the primary mechanism for community members to get to know you.
The change we did make was to stop attributing wiki articles to their most recent contributor. That feature was a mistake. It created incentives for poor quality submissions (e.g. publish a “.” and own the article.) It created incentives for authors to roll back useful additions – and in a few cases it created off-line arguments between professionals. It also yielded excessive spam. It had to be fixed. I’d love to hear more suggestions for rewarding great wiki contributions but can tell you that attributing articles to the person that touched them last doesn’t work.
Next, regarding the use of a wiki format to create a reference for Real Estate consumers — the idea there is straight forward. Opinion can create great content but can’t create a useful “guide” because it’s not comprehensive and it’s seldom objective. Who should “own” defining what a “mortgage” is on Zillow? Should it be Brian Brady or would Dan Green be better suited? The fact is, they could probably both bring something to the table in an effort to describe what a mortgage is to a first-time buyer. And that’s what the wiki on Zillow is all about.
Also, note that there are many other opportunities to “own” your posts on Zillow — in the new Discussions, in your neighborhood pages, in Home Q&A — and obviously on your profile page. What I’m seeing is that users, especially the experts, specialize predominantly in one of those forums. And that’s OK – homeowners and Real Estate professionals are a pretty diverse bunch. We’re building a site that includes all flavors of Real Estate consumer and professional – which also implies that not every feature we release will appeal to you (personally) – and that is also OK.
July 19, 2007 — 11:22 am
Greg Swann says:
We’re talking across each other, David. This has nothing to do with me other than that it was my ox that was gored, which made it fun for me to write about. Moreover, it does not matter what Zillow might want to do with the content. The problem is simply this: Why would anyone create content under these terms?
The encyclopedia is not an end in itself, it is simply the means by which Zillow hopes to engender greater participation. If the sanctity of the idea of an encyclopedia impedes participation, Zillow is twice in error. Luckily, there is a solution for both errors. It’s called Web 2.0.
Here’s a better way of doing things:
What you will have at the end will be, at best, an heuristic encyclopedia. If you want, you can write quote-and-link articles to cover complex ideas more comprehensively. But you will have provided an on-going incentive for smart people to produce original content — without fear of being ripped-off or revised into a fully-attributed insipidity.
I’m right about this. Take it up with the other decision-makers. Frankly, y’all should have me up there for a day to talk about participation in general.
July 19, 2007 — 11:59 am
Trang - The Legacy Group says:
Greg, why don’t you just add a wiki to your blog…or over at bloggin101
July 19, 2007 — 12:19 pm
Poppy Dinsey says:
Quote: “To the men from Zoomf: Good on ya! Very clean design. I like the “we’ll figure it out” type-a-location box. The blog is fun, too. I’ve subscribed. ”
Glad you like the blog…but ‘The men at Zoomf?!’ I’m a lady 😉
But we don’t want a whole new arguement starting on this post… hehehehe.
July 19, 2007 — 12:57 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Glad you like the blog…but ‘The men at Zoomf?!’ I’m a lady
My apologies.
If I may presume, make the logo a link to the top of the blog. If someone comes in by hard click, as they might from my link this morning, I think it’s best to make it easy for them to explore the rest of the blog. The way to do it is to get the image out of the CSS file and then physically declare it within the div in header.php. That way you can wrap the image (border=0) in the link, just like a normal linking image.
July 19, 2007 — 1:09 pm
David G from Zillow.com says:
“Frankly, y’all should have me up there”
You know you’re welcome and I know better than to offer you a plane ticket; so just let me know when you’re coming.
It fascinates me how we web2.0 citizens align ourselves with the various interactive interfaces. Many bloggers think communities are a waste of time while Facebook’ers laugh at the A-list. Even wiki experts can’t agree and so, Larry split from Jimmy to do Citizendium even while wikipedia was starting to crush the blogs in the SERP’s.
All this loyalty is impressive but to get the big picture you need to step back from your tribe (bloggers) and appreciate the diversity of the new internet. There is a place for both blogging and wiki’ing and the art of building giant, scalable communities is knowing when to employ which tool.
Definitely a discussion to be had over a few beers.
July 19, 2007 — 2:04 pm
Greg Swann says:
Erf. We’re not talking about the internet in the abstract, we’re talking about a particular real world problem. Your solution is sub-optimal. Mine is better. In general, building tools that permit people to do what they want will work better than trying to shoehorn them into pre-designed cubicles, but, even so, this is not a general case. Your encylowiki will attract content from knowledgeable, qualified contributors only until they figure out that submitting new content is not to their net advantage, weighed against other things they might do with their time. Brushing me off doesn’t make the problem go away.
July 19, 2007 — 2:14 pm