Increasingly interactive as well as networked nature makes the rise of user-led innovation in digital media environments. As a result, produsage, a brand new concept, pointed out by Axel Brunes, it highlits that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge.
Baidu zhidao is a good example of produsage. This is a community-driven knowledge market website launched by Baidu which is a leading Chinese search engine. The principle of Baidu zhidao is like Yahoo answers. Baidu zhidao provides a community that allows users to both submit a question to be answered while also can answer question asked by others. In this process, the user can be seen as both of the content of creator and also the receiver. This reflects the point in Alex Bruns’s reading: In the produsage, the boundary of producer and consumer is indistinct.
One of the biggest characters of produsage is that open participation. Baidu zhidao as “Information communities”: “communities or networks of individuals and/or organizations that rendezvous around an information commons, a collection of information that is open to all on equal terms”(Bruns 2008, 15). It makes people get, and share information and knowledge easily. In the Baidu zhidao, when someone asks a question, everyone can participate and answer it. It shows the principles of collective intelligence that collective pool of social knowledge by simultaneously expanding the extent of human interactions enabled by communications networks that can generate new knowledge, and the greatly enhanced capacity to codify, store, and retrieve such knowledge thorough collective access to networked databases.
On the other hand, the open participation in the Baidu zhidao also reflects a problem of produsage which should be considered and try to solve it. In the Baidu zhidao, there are some questions about some serious topics. For instance, some questions are about health problem of humans. Although some users give some answers and comments for this kind of questions, I can find some errors or feel that some answers which not look with a professional tone. This may causes a serious result, because the user who asks the question may will follow the advice from these answers. This aspect of produsage can relate to what Jenkins describes as a participatory, convergence culture: “this is what happens when consumers take media into their own hands. … Within convergence culture, everyone’s a participant-although participants may have different degrees of status and influence.”
So it leaves a question: how can we evaluate the information and try to get knowledge from experts in the produsage. According to the example of Baidu zhidao, I think about a way which may help users to evaluate the answers from others. I think that we can give a grade to every participant in this community according to the quality of his answers to questions in the history. People who always answer questions with high quality will get higher grade. Therefore, the grade can help users to evaluate the answers and get knowledge which is more trustful and reliable.
Refrences:
Bruns, A. 2006. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: from production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang.
Jekins, H. 2006. Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Welcome to convergence culture.http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/06/welcome_to_convergence_culture.html
(accessed April 20, 2009)
Tags: Baidu zhidao, collective_intelligence, convergence_culture, Produsage
