If you can see it coming, it's probably not disruptive.

Brace yourselves; this post is a rant on Google and disruptive technologies. ©

For some time now, people have been talking about Google Docs and other similar efforts to port an MS Office style environment to the online world - into "the cloud" - as being disruptive. Disruptive technologies are those that have displaced existing technologies, in the process almost magically displacing the dominant incumbent companies that champion the existing technology. In the 1980s, HP's inkjet printers offered a cheaper, but "good enough", alternative to large and expensive heavyweight alternatives from the likes of Xerox. The inkjet stole market share, forced Xerox to move to more upmarket customers, and ultimately sealed HP's name in the printing business. Other examples include digital downloads displacing CDs and DVDs, as well as email displacing postal mail.

Disruptive technologies of the past have not altogether been obvious at the outset that they are disruptive. Had they been so, the companies they threatened would have noticed them and taken action to ensure they were not displaced. So it is that Microsoft, eyeing the potential disruption that is Google Docs, has created its own rival offering. In this particular case, it would appear that the existing incumbent technology could well survive the threat of the disruptive Google Docs. However, I don't believe that Google Docs was ever disruptive to begin with.

Google Docs continues to work with the existing paradigm of documents and files. If you were to take out the rich formatting in the document you send in an email, what is the difference between the document and the email text itself? Why could the document not have been written in an email client itself? Why do we need to open a separate application to edit a document, which we then save and send out in another email? Google Docs continues to perpetuate this behavior by simply taking the offline Office experience and putting it into a browser. Surely the browser affords a new way to work with information? In disruptive technology lingo, it could be said that Google Docs is "cramming" the existing Office concept into a new technology. As a result, everyone can see it coming. So I would suggest that Google Docs and online office suites are probably not disruptive.

So what is disruptive in the office suite space? If we take the behavior of sending each other emails with documents attached, then perhaps Google's Wave product is the truly disruptive technology. The email is the document. Collaborators change different elements of the document inline. There is no need to open a separate application to work on the document. Many think that Google Wave is disruptive of email; even the Google Wave team position Wave as what email would be if it were invented now and not 40 years ago. However, a large portion of my emails is between myself and one other person. Most of my emails also do not require the playback/forward sophistication of Wave. I think email is still the simplest solution for most private text based communication. Wave's strengths in collaborative working – in collaboratively creating documents.

It is probably not obvious that Google Wave could disrupt the office suites, rather than email. That's why it might just do that.

When Google Is Not Enough

This picture describes the Invisible Web, the deep layers of the web that search engines such as Google can not reach. ©

Flickr produces much better image search results than Google. YouTube produces much better video search results than Google. Twitter produces much better search on real time conversation than Google. There are numerous special cases where Google just does not produce the best results possible. Why is this?

Historically the Internet has been random web pages scattered across the world. Search engines, such as Google, have always excelled at organizing such random and unstructured information and making it meaningful for people doing searches. However, the unstructured nature of information across different web sites has meant there is always a boundary to how much the quality can be improved. How does Google determine the meaning of a picture on one site compared to the next? Should it use the words surrounding the picture? Should it give meaning to the filename of the picture? The Semantic Web is an initiative to provide structure to the information on the Internet. Though promising, after many years it still has yet to gain any traction.

Flickr, YouTube and Twitter - within their local spaces - have delivered on the promise of what a Semantic Web could be. They have made it easy to search through difficult to find photos, videos and conversational threads. They have done this by owning all the data they search through. In a radical departure from searching through random and unstructured web pages, because each of these three services owns the data they store - they can collect and structure the information exactly as they need to. For photos, Flickr enables users to tag parts of pictures with labels. YouTube requests people uploading videos to add details such as artist, title and other information. Twitter has immediate access to all twitter messages within its own databases - making real time search of Internet conversations possible - it does not need to crawl the Internet to update it's search results. By owning all the data, each of Flickr, YouTube and Twitter have explicitly structured the data to produce better results for users searching for photos, videos and through conversations.

With the emphasis of the Internet becoming "store everything on The Cloud", I expect the trend of mega-sites owning vast specialized and structured information to continue. You don't use Google to search for a house you want to buy - you use something like propertyfinder.com, which stores all the data on houses available on the housing market. If you want to purchase a book or toy you go to Amazon or eBay and search there. If you want to find out what your friends are doing, you don't ask Google - you ask Facebook instead. Are there other pillars of the Internet where a simple Google search just does not produce good enough results? What is the next opportunity whereby just owning all the data yourself will produce the best results for the user?

This post was inspired by an article by Battelle and a Twitter by Fred Wilson.

The Return of Brand Integrated TV Shows?

 BMW's mini-series stars Clive Owen and is directed by star directors, such as Guy Ritchie. (c).

I previously discussed how television networks act as a three way match-making platform for audiences, content makers and advertisers.  It was not always this way. In the distant past, advertisers heavily influenced the shows made for television. The medium was more akin to a two-way platform between advertisers and audiences: advertisers made shows for audiences interested in tuning in. This changed in the 1950s. With technologies such as TiVO and on-demand TV scuppering commercial breaks, are we now set to return to a world of advertiser made shows?

In the 1930s and 1940s, the early years of television and radio, broadcasting acted more instinctively as a two way match making platform between advertisers and audiences. Advertisers strongly influenced and shaped content broadcast to the audience. This is evident in the naming of show titles, which included the Ford Star Jubilee and General Electric Theater. The influence of advertisers was such that, one story even suggests that the president of the American Tobacco Company made high ranking NBC executives fox-trot to the tunes of a show that the American Tobacco Company was sponsoring. The American Tobacco Company head wanted the NBC executives to test the tempos of the songs for dance-ability.

In the late 1940s, William Paley's CBS started experimenting with making shows in-house. The experiment proved successful, as CBS in-house shows started gaining larger audiences than that of shows broadcast by NBC. Everything changed when Pat Weaver, president of NBC in the early 1950s, broke the ties that advertisers had with the content that was broadcast. Instead of advertisers sponsoring a show and working with an advertising agency to make it, the networks made the shows themselves. The focus of the advertising agency moved to making 30-second commercials for the breaks in the shows. Later, rather than making the shows in house, the networks outsourced production of the shows to studios and production companies. This is what now leaves us with the three party platform of content makers, advertisers and audiences that network TV now is.

However, the arrival of technologies such as TiVO, on-demand TV technology and the Internet is creating difficulty for this three way matchmaking system. Viewers can now skip advertisements. Over the last decade, this has started to cause significant problems for advertisers, who have been spending money on commercials that audiences can now choose to skip. The response by advertisers has been a trend taking us back to the previous age of advertiser influenced shows. BMW has a history of using product placement. However, the company took this further with two series of short films featuring BMW cars. You can see the films here:

http://fincherfanatic.blogspot.com/2007/08/bmw-films.html

These films, distributed on the internet, have been so successful - they have inspired similar efforts by Pirelli and Mercedes. In the meanwhile, Fox has started dedicating TV slots for infomercials, which they hope in future will become as entertaining as regular TV. NBC had already started creating shows for displaying in show advertisements - though these shows will only be broadcast online. In the case of the show Mall Cop, TV producers have advertised Segway PTs not for gaining profit - but out of their own shear enthusiasm for the product.

Will this transformation in advertising create moral ambiguity? Certainly. Advertisers and content makers will need to grapple with how brand sponsored content can be made ethically. Will this mean that quality TV programming will deteriorate? I think not. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, MTV pioneered the concept of the music video: the consumer tunes in for the advertising message. Investment in music videos increased, production quality of the content form sky rocketed and the music industry was forever changed. No one minds that it is advertising. What needs to happen for this to happen to regular TV shows?

The matchmaking business that is television

Television is a three-way match-making business.

The business of television is simple: using television programming, attract as many viewers of particular demographics as possible to watch advertisements. Television has traditionally always been a three way match making platform between advertisers, content makers and you - the audience. How will the internet change this three-way relationship?

Traditionally the TV network (or station) has played the role of matchmaker among three parties.

• Content makers, i.e. studios and producers, work with networks to create TV programs that will attract particular audiences. Golf tournaments attract older, affluent audiences. Shows such as Friends attract younger audiences.
• Advertisers, using ad agencies, buy advertisement slots on the TV network. The advertisers use the TV shows' target demographic to determine which shows the advertisements should appear adjacent to. BMW, for example, wants to reach a large older, affluent audience. Starbucks targets the younger audience that might love to congregate in a coffee shop.
• Audiences tune into to the TV network, attracted by the programming on the network. If all goes to plan, an older, affluent audience will watch the golf programming and also watch the advertising of advertisers, such as BMW, targeting this audience. Younger audiences will watch a TV programs such as Friends and also watch advertisements from advertisers, such Starbucks, targeting this audience.

If not enough viewers watch a particular TV program, as determined by ACNielson ratings, the network will cut the program to find another show that will bring in the audiences. The process is ruthless and the battle for viewer numbers is fierce. If the network has done its matchmaking job right, particular audiences will be attracted to particular shows in large numbers. The TV programming then becomes the vehicle for advertisers to reach the audience they are targeting. The ability of networks to attract funding, through selling advertising slots to advertisers, is related to how many viewers the network can attract. The greater the number of viewers, the more that can be charged for advertising. This reaches millions of dollars for advertisement slots during the Superbowl.

This matchmaking system is for the masses.

• The individual viewer is not targeted. Particular times in the TV schedule are used to determine the demographic of viewers. For example, daytime TV is typically for 'stay at home mums', whereas prime-time is family viewing and late night TV is for adults. Particular TV channels also target particular types of viewers, e.g. the Sci-Fi Channel attracts a different audience to Al-Jazeera.
  
• The advertising message is not targeted. You may already own the credit card that is advertised during the ad break. The commercial should then surely tell you about the additional features that can be bought with the card you already have. Instead, the advertising is generic.
  
• The content is not targeted. If you are watching a documentary on the Internet, you might be watching to learn about the history of the Internet, whereas another viewer may hope to learn something of the technical infrastructure. On the flip side, some content does not need to be targeted: in some cases content makers have refined the art of storytelling to the point on keeping audiences enthralled throughout the program.

The deficiencies in this great match making system are largely due to technical limitations. Television has always been a broadcast medium: sending messages from one to many. There has not been a way for the three parties to easily and dynamically respond to the other parties. The Internet changes this relationship. On the Internet, if the individual member of the audience is logged into a website, it is possible to for the viewer to provide instant feedback to the others in the matchmaking system. Advertisers and content makers are able to change and adapt what is shown to the viewer. This enables a matchmaking system for the individual:

• The individual viewer can control what they watch. The TV schedule becomes a schedule of when TV programs become available for watching. You are able to watch on-demand the programs that interest you.
  
• The advertising message is crafted for the specific individual. Personalization will allow advertisers to determine what is the most appropriate messages to be sent to you.
  
• The content is interactive. The high-end of interactivity is video games. The low end is flicking through segments of a TV show, as you might via scene selection menus on a DVD. The future will be shows that gauge your level of interest as you are watching, and craft the show to your tastes and interests. 

The effect of the Internet on television will be to make the matchmaking ever more efficient. With efforts already under way to bring Internet TV to the living room, this may all happen sooner than we think.

Tech Predictions for 2009

Perceptive Pixel is one way one way the which the way people interact with technology is changing.


As 2009 approaches, all kinds of are people starting to think about the future and what it holds. These are my predictions for next year in the technology space: 

• I think we can expect advances in interaction devices that make it easier for people to interact with computers, as the iPhone multi-touch and Wii's remote control have done. It is the 25th anniversary of the Mac in 2009; perhaps Apple will introduce a touch-screen / tablet PC that works.
• Increasing availability of free wifi spots driving mobile internet usage. My sister wanders around her university, shopping centres and home - constantly browsing the internet on her iPod Touch (not iPhone) through free wifi spots.
• New collaborative / Social Media technologies for the workplace take off. For example, at my current workplace we have started using Yammer, a Twitter type thing.
• With Firefox 4 adding Prism and Chrome already including Google Gears, more and more applications will be built for the web browser rather than the desktop. i.e. more things like Google Apps and Zoho.
• New forms of devices that are neither mobile phones or computers will continue to reach expanding niches. This continues the trend of devices such as satnavs, flip cameras, ebook readers and portable gaming devices such as the PSP.
  
• The internet will continue to challenge newspapers, movie producers and all other creators of content. How can money be made when content becomes free? Media companies, such as local newspapers, will continue to face bankruptcy.  News ways of funding / paying for content will need to be found. These could include, creating scarcities (pdf), crowdfunding, or new forms of product placement.
  

Portals, Portals, Everywhere

Netvibes is among the most popular start page / personal portal thingies.

Around 2002, a friend and I were interested in the concept of Portals; we started researching the area quite heavily. MyYahoo was the big portal service on the Internet, and IBM was commercialising JetSpeed for corporations that wanted to use portals. The concept did not really take off though. Over the last year and a half, things have started to change and portals have started coming into usage. Except, the word ‘portal’ is not being used.

At my employer, we are looking at building ‘dashboards’ for the executives to see what is going on around the business. We are looking at Microsoft Sharepoint to do some of that. It has the concept of ‘web parts’ to build pages with.

Outside the corporation, services like iGoogle provide something similar. I use iGoogle to get a view of my GMail inbox, get a view on my Google Reader feeds on blogs and news sites I am interested. I also get a view on the price of stocks I am interested in, as well as my Calendar. Meanwhile, on Facebook and even the BBC.co.uk homepage, boxed widgets / applications are used to customise the page for a viewer.

The portal technology of old may not have progressed far, but the concept certainly has.

The Creative Dividend for TV Programme Production

I listened to a speech by the BBC's Mark Harrison (Head of the Multi-platform, Innovation & Development Studio) today and was impressed that someone has been thinking about the collision of the Internet and broadcast technologies in a similar way to me!

Mark pointed that all the substantial and popular web sites in the world today are platforms for content, e.g. Facebook and Youtube. None of the big sites are content providers. Yet, these platforms, particularly something like YouTube or VLogs, do not produce content of the quality that the BBC does. The BBC has significant expertise in producing quality TV programmes. Youtube and other sites hosting content do not host any content that matches the quality of the BBC's output. Mark stipulates that the big challenge in the coming years is producing a site or technology that successfully marries the Platform and the substantial content quality that is possible through BBC expertise in content production. If and when this becomes a reality, a 'creative dividend' will be realised that truely redefines what is possible and takes TV programme production to the next level.

My personal opinion is that YouTube makes it easy for people to upload and share their videos. However, to produce a quality programme requires many different skillsets, such as script writing, acting, directing and post-production to name a few. Very few people or groups of people have all these necessary skills to produce quality content. Instead, on Youtube we get clips that feature a few of these skills in isolation: perhaps a 3 minute video that features a great comic script or another video with inspiring photography. I expect that in the next ten years technology will emerge that will make it easier for different people with different skills to collaborate online to produce a quality programme. In the same way that software like Firefox is produced in an 'open source' environment, ways of producing 'open source' TV programmes will develop. In the same way that open source software like Firefox includes contributions from developers working for commercial companies, 'open source' TV progammes may feature skilled people from the BBC and commercial companies helping in the production.

If and when such a technology that allows for colloboration and creation of quality content emerges, this will truly reshape the way TV programmes are produced. If this method of production becomes widespread enough, it may even become a 'Youtube killer'.

Can the Social Web save chives?

How can companies get consumers enthused about their products as a way of boosting product sales? Seth points to the desperate attempts of Tide and the Chives Marketing Board to do just this. Tide has sent out an email to a number of customers to survey their laundry habits. The Chives Marketing Board has begun an advertising campaign to urge consumers to increase their daily chive intake.

Charles Leadbeater's We-Think and Don Tapscott's Wikinomics suggest that the social movement of the web will transform a number of industries such that it will become normal for consumers to be involved in the actual production of what they consume. The Linux operating system is a famous example of this, but there are other examples, such as OhMyNews - the South Korean news site that accepts articles from readers.

How can we apply this idea to Tide and the Chives Marketing Board?

Consumers of Tide could probably discuss online their laundry habits, rather than in a survey, and help distill what it is about the brand they like and don't like. This might then focus the researchers and technical teams at Tide to address the problems they have with their product, as well inspire them to satisfy any latent needs. A market like the washing powder market does innovate, even if slowly. However, how much of this is consumer led and meeting consumers' specific needs?

With respect to Chives, I think it is merely a matter of determining some great foods which use chives as an ingredient. Again - a recipe invention site where people can show off what people have come up with might re-ingite some interest in chives; something like the Simpsoniser for chives.

Will mashups will be like air?

A mashup of San Francisco's BART station maps and timetables.

Are we now finally entering the age of programmatic sites driven by other sites, i.e. the age of the 'mash-up'?

Although more and more websites are now offering APIs that allow you to access the underlying data programmatically, very few of the 'mash-ups' that have arisen from these have had popular appeal. Google Maps is the exception, managing to offer an API that allows for every person and thing in the world to be easily represented on a map. Web sites that offer real estates to restaurants now look behind the times if they don't use this technology.

However, Groundswell is claiming that their prediction that social networks will be like air is about to come true: Facebook has announced that it will be launching Facebook Connect, a way to connect your Facebook identity to other sites. Imagine having your book reviews on Amazon tied to your Facebook account and seeing your friends' Amazon reviews via their Facebook profile. In many ways, if Facebook Connect works as well as it sounds, it could be like the Google Maps of the social networking world.

Both Google Maps and Facebook Connect provide an element to existing sites which would be difficult for these existing sites to do themselves. A restaurant site does not want to manage data on maps or build fancy social profiles of all their users. Perhaps this model of 'outsourcing' elements of interactivity that are non-core to a site is the way to do mashups?

90% of virtual world projects fail

Infoweek reports that 90% of virtual world projects fail, including the many companies that rushed into building a virtual presence on virtual worlds such as Second Life and There.com.

It appears a lot of companies established a presence in virtual worlds simply because it was 'the thing to do'. These presences tended to be virtual locations, such as stores and exhibitions. In reality, what most people are interested in is collaborating with people. It is widely known that most 'collaboration' on Second Life is gambling and sex. How uses of virtual worlds will move beyond this to other things, such as for businesses promoting their products, remains a mystery.

Google: The emergence of mobile and the web platform

CEO Eric Schmidt has made a presentation at the Annual Stockholders Meeting. Here are some of the highlights:

• Google expects that adverts will become more narrative, engaging and interactive.
• Eric suggest that the defining technological shift of our generation will be the shift from PC centric to internet centric. Why have things stored locally on different devices when you can access everything from any device? There are over 500,000 businesses are now using Google Apps for your domain.
• The emergence of mobile. Japan, which is seen as a front runner for technology, has 81% of people accessing the internet from their mobile. Also, the top three selling books over the last year first appeared for reading on mobiles before appearing in print.
• There are more smart people outside of Google than inside Google. Google is building a 'web platform': Android and other APIs allow the smart people outside Google to build on top of Google's technology.

Elsewhere, Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, mentions briefly that the internet will increasingly become asia centric because that is where most potential users are; most people in the US and Europe are already using the internet. Everyone needs to pay attention to this Asia growth area, in terms of its culture and differences to the west.

Firefox 3 adds fuel to the death of the desktop

I've been playing around with the beta releases of Firefox 3, which have been available for a few months. Mozilla, the open source foundation that creates the browser, has spelt out the improvements they have made. While most users will only notice subtle differences, such as the much quicker speed at which web applications such as Google Mail work, the greater impact of Firefox 3 is the new capabilities it provides web developers.

Firefox 3 lets web applications, such as Google Docs and Facebook, request that resources be cached to allow the application to be used while offline. Firefox 3 also allows web applications to detect whether or not there's an active Internet connection, as well as to detect when the connection goes up and down. These added capabilities mean that it will be possible for users to continue writing their emails and working with the web applications while they are on the train and away from internet connectivity, for example.

Fundamentally what these new resources mean is that Firefox 3 will provide a way for all the applications that were once written as desktop applications to be written as web applications that can be used offline (as a desktop application would be) as well as be used online. Surmising from my previous post, in the same way Windows moved the base platform from the command prompt to the graphical user interface, it looks more and more likely that we are going to see the platform move again to the web.

The convergence of social communication

For how much longer are people going to use separate and disparate social networks, email accounts, instant messenger services and even things like mobile phones - all run by separate providers, each with its own 'friends list' and none compatible with the other?

As it so happens, we are starting to see some convergence:

• GrandCentral already allows you to view and listen to your phone's voicemail from a web page. The technology is promising and has been bought by Google for integration with Google Docs, which includes Google Mail.
• Google Mail and Yahoo Mail already offer a 'lite' chat mechanism from within their web pages, allowing you to chat with your friends who also have Google/Yahoo accounts.
• Facebook now has a mechanism for instigating instant messenger like chats.
• AOL is buying Bebo so that the Bebo social network can be merged with AOL's Instant Messengering (aka AIM) service.

This trend raises some interesting questions, such as 'is convergence useful?' and 'what would a completely converged communication mechanism look/sound/function like?'.

Getting to the top of Digg

Stan Schroeder reveals the life cycle of a Digg story. The post is a fantastic analysis of how a story on Digg gets to the top, while others fail to do so. The key element to Digg's algorithm seems to be not the number of diggs, but the velocity of them: how many diggs a story gets per hour. Additionally, the diggs in the earlier part of the story's life cycle count for more than those in the latter part. Who has dugg the story is also important: the top users have higher influence.

The end of the Windows desktop?

Back when I was using a 80386 PC in the 1990s, I would start up my pc and the first thing that would happen was that a black screen with a C:> single command prompt would appear. Most of the time, I would then just punch in the following command against the prompt:
C:> win
This command would boot up Windows 3, a graphical user interface for your PC. More and more applications were migrating to this platform, rather than being started up stand alone from the C:> command prompt. In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, marking the end of the C:> command prompt as the base platform. The base had platform shifted to the graphical user interface.

These days, the first thing I do when I start up my Windows XP PC is to start my Firefox browser. From here I can access my email on GMail and connect with my friends on Facebook. I have even started editing my documents online using Google Docs. I can see the end is near for the graphical user interface we call 'the desktop'. The platform is about to move again to the Web.

8 ways to make digital content valuable

Following on from my previous post summerising some concepts of free content distribution that are being talked about on the Internet: TechDirt point to a post by Kevin Kelly that describes eight ways in which scarcity can be added to digital content to make it valuable enough to pay for.

I think the first two that Kevin points out are particularly compelling:

• Immediacy: imagine having tomorrow's content, today. What is interesting about this idea is that it is the opposite of the BBC opening up its Archive, which is centred around making old content available to viewers. Which would you pay more for: the next episode of Lost now instead of next week or an episode of Lost from a month ago? The answer to this question may vary depending on the type of programme that is substituted for Lost. In the same way that Jackson 5 songs have reemerged in charts of songs sold through iTunes, there may be some programmes that people will want to watch over and over again.
• Personalisation: in a world where there are millions of websites and hundreds of TV channels, determining what and where to consume your media from can be challenge. Amazon.com has for years used technology to guide users to the things they are interested in. Imagine you could have all news you are interested in - what is happening in your local area, the latest news to feed your addiction to Le Mans racing - all of this for the same price as an in print daily newspaper. Would you buy it?
  

Is it possible to make money from digital content?

In a world where content is given away for free, how do you make money? Newspapers are struggling in world where news is available for free online. The music industry, Hollywood and a number of other makers of content are feeling the pain of having their content freely distributed by 'fans'.

Mike Masnick has finished a his series of posts on the economics of Free. The central thesis is simple: In the past there was a cost associated with producing music tapes, videos or newspapers. The consumer paid for this cost. Digital distribution mean there is zero cost in producing new copies of the content. This means the 'thing' that people are willing to pay for has shifted. People will now pay £350 for an iPod and free music, whereas in the past it would be ridiculous to think you'd pay more than £40 for a Walkman. The key is in recognising which elements of the experience have scarcity, i.e. there is a limited supply of. Physical goods, such as iPods and CDs are scarce. Digital content is easily copied, so is not scarce.

The theory is compelling. Media companies across the world will need to face these challenges; I suspect the those that are most capable of creating scarcity in the way they distribute content will win big.

Harvard publishes case study on Wikipedia

Harvard Business School has written a case study on Wikipedia. The article describes some of the social practices that take place in the Wikipedia community.

Research indicated that many people around the world contributed content to Wikipedia and that this initial content was then refined over time by a relatively small group of editors.

This seems to suggest that initial contributions are a stimulus around which a group of people form. The result of the collaboration of this group is to arrive at a new Wikipedia article.

in August of 2006 the Wikimedia Foundation had only five full-time employees

An amazing statistic that defies the substantial amounts of money that some companies can spend in moderating and maintaining forums. How is this achieved? Largely by the fact that anyone can edit the Wikipedia entries. Well understood processes, such as AfD (article for deletion) and RfA (request for adminship), are used to make decisions. Although these are lengthy and time consuming, these ultimately result in greater engagement of users to the Wikipedia site. In fact, the extent of this engagement is sometimes to the detriment of the original reason people join the site - to create articles:

Nicholas Carr: three high-ranking Wikipedians... describe Wikipedia's increasingly complex governance structure, from its proliferation of hierarchical roles to its "career paths" to its regulatory committees and processes to its arcane content templates. We learn that working the bureaucracy tends to become its own reward for the most dedicated Wikipedians: "Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing."

That contents of articles are debated has other negative consequences too - it deters real experts from contributing to the site:

Larry Sanger: nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will—at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy—be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts.

Despite possibly deterring experts, Wikipedia does however seem to be sufficiently accurate as an Encyclopedia.

In late 2005, the scientific journal Nature, the top-ranked science journal, conducted a study comparing the accuracy of science entries in Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica. The research involved examining the same set of 42 science articles from each reference work. It revealed that Encyclopedia Britannica had 123 errors while Wikipedia had 162 (for averages of 2.9 and 3.9 errors per article).... most readers simply want to know whether a source can generally be relied upon. What these results say to me is that Wikipedia isn't bad in this regard.

Wikipedia has defied critics and has worked as a concept: an Encyclopedia created through the collaboration of normal people. Part of the reason for its success is likely to be due to the way in which the site has maintained the interest and attention of it's contributors - through roles, processes and policies that engage users in discussion .