ok… I am NOT one to shill, or schmooze, or suck-up. Just not in my blood. So i will be the first one to point out that I think of Unity and Steve of OrganizedWisdom as friends and as smart entrepreneurs. Some of the health2.0 community have given the new OW approach a yawn. YET, i have a different perspective on the changes. I have no idea of the business model, nor sustainability but as far as results… I LIKE’em I like them a lot!
Right now, i dare you to do a search on Type II diabetes via google, healia, pick any search engine and pick out the items of value. It’s a mixed bag of results with a lot of noise, albeit, some “bags” are better than others. Just as Mahalo has launched with a lot of skepticsm… so has OW garnered it’s naysayers… and yet… “guided/ human-powered suggestions” WORKS.
So here is the acid test for me as to long-term success. I asked several friends to do a diabetes search via their favorite internet tools (many of these people are in their mid 30s, 40s, and even 50s) and then compare that to OW. 100% said that they liked the common-sense, summarized, “just tell me the important stuff in plain English” results of OW. They love Google and MSN and etc. but they want advice to weed through the noise when it comes to health questions.
As with Health2.0 and Web2.0 and other acronyms… sometimes the obvious is not so obvious which makes making something easy, not so easy [whew! that's a brain teaser]
Nice job guys! Looking forward to more.
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Thanks for the post! And we hope to hear more feedback (good and critical) so we can keep getting better. We’d love to hear what the folks yawning have to say…what are the complaints and skepticisms so far? We’ve got a long road ahead so we like to address these issues head on.
We’ve heard a lot about Scalability issues which seems to be a big question. But I think Wikipedia proved what a few thousand people can do when working using a MediaWiki platform. We already have nearly 40 guides working on WisdomCards and we haven’t even announced anything about our Guide Program yet. A year from now, think what we can do with a 1,000 people curating, reviewing and monitoring WisdomCards on 10,000 of the most popular health topics. It starts to get exciting as we scale this thing so we look forward to showing the doubters out there through results over the next few years. Let’s remember Google nor Wikipedia were arouund only a few years ago. A lot can happen in a few years time with a great collaborative team, technology, and a lot of hard work…
One thing I love about a new trend we are seeing is “partially open” environments. That is, not everyone can edit. Some people have more priviledges than others. This helps ensure quality to communities. We’re seeing open systems like DIGG becoming overrun by “Mobs”…that is they are gameable. OW can’t be gamed because of our review process. This will help us keep the bad stuff out. And the good stuff in on each WisdomCard.
Anyway, my partner Steven Krein is looking forward to previewing the new service for the first time at the Health2.0 show you guys will be at. We’ll be talking a lot about the power that comes when you layer smart people on top of great social media and collaboration platforms.
As a final thought, we’d also love to hear more from the naysayers out there who are yawning. What do you think needs to be improved? We’re in early beta so all thoughts welcome. Ping me any time at unity organizedwisdom com.