content authoring + silo data still holding sway

2011 and Quora.com seems to be next site to seep into the main stream of early adopters online. I describe these sort of sites as prompted content authoring.  What is unprompted content authoring?  That would be publishing a blog post.  A twitter update is also authoring (note those with a monopoly -ish athoring platform then have an exclusive over doing stuff with that data or via an API allow others to help them do so).  Authoring seems pretty straight forward to describe but prompted/unprompted seems harder to pin down as every bit of information is authored in a conversation? Right?

I want to put forward an observation to explain unprompted content authoring v prompted. Unprompted content is content authored based on an individuals free will, maybe in response to a conversation, an idea, to take issue with another post. The point is they are free to author anyway they like and additionally they are free to host and publish the content where they please.  The down side is that content will be dis- intermediated from all the other content in the information universe.  Okay, comment, track backs aid connection but are reliant on direct linking from those who know the content has been published. But who knows everything?  Prompted content authoring is constraining the context and gathers demand around that context to increase the probability of answers and of course answer are just more prompted content authoring.  For me the prompted – unprompted divide is based not on the act of authoring content per say but in setting the community environment so that more content is authored in context around aggregate demand.  The quoras are bringing efficiency to this by centralising the demand, much as Groupon does for individuals to aggregate demand for local suppliers.  I think time will show this need to centralise will be a transient period in the evolution of the web as all the ‘answers’ will be authored and all individuals will be connect in context regardless of where they author there content online (ie no one website setup for each purpose).  This decentralized demand authoring is better described in this unprompted post by EmergentbyDesign blog.

Tags: authoring, centralization, connection, content, de-centralization, efficiency