Much has been written and said about "information overload" during the past several years. Noted technologist and author, Clay Shirky, gave a widely referenced talk about it at the Web 2.0 Expo conference a year ago. He posited that information overload is actually filter failure. I wholeheartedly agree. However, I believe that the crux of the issue is the lack of context.
As the amount of digital content continues to grow, the need for context – in the form of metadata, profiles, and relationships – becomes ever more important. Popular tech pundit Robert Scoble provides a hint of this need for context in his recent blog entry. He uses the analogy of atoms vs. molecules to describe the differences in terms of useful value between individual content items (e.g. tweets, photos, videos) and groupings of related content (e.g. tweets related to Haiti, photos from several people who attended a party).
A simpler example of context is the title of this blog entry. The phrases "rather than content" and "part 1 of several" provide context for the topic of "context is king." The reader doesn’t need to go beyond the title in order to have a fairly good idea what the blog entry is about.
So, how is context manifested and leveraged in online community software? Ideally, every content item should be displayed with contextual information that helps the reader quickly assess the relevant value of the content. Shown below is an actual content item from the Telligent Developer Space community forums. Notice the context that is provided:
But it’s not enough just to show context, additional context specific to the user should be subtly prompted and readily captured without the user having to figure out how to provide it. In the same screenshot below, notice the "This is a suggested answer" and "Rate this" and "Favorite this thread" options. These options capture additional context for the content item, which in turn provides added value to subsequent users.
Another example of the usefulness of context is in the QuickPost widget provided in Telligent Community 5.5 and Telligent Enterprise 2.5. Shown below is a screenshot of the widget from Telligent’s intranet. The widget defaults to capturing a status message from the user, but context is provided for other types of content that the user can post.
When "Write a Blog" is clicked, the widget contextually detects the blog(s) that I own and changes the fields to capture the appropriate information for a blog entry
When "Start a Discussion" is clicked, the widget contextually detects the forums that I have favorited or previously posted to, and changes the fields to capture the appropriate information for a forum post.
The "Share a File" and "Publish to Wiki" options provide similar functionality in a contextual manner. I will provide additional examples of contextual usability in future blog entries. My belief is that the ultimate power of community and collaboration software lies in its ability to easily capture and effectively leverage context so that information can be filtered, ranked, curated, correlated, and found much more readily than it is today.