One of the biggest problems of wikidom today is not WikiSpam but the tendency to redraw fundamental parts of communication from the main online community platform ("stage") to BackStage systems. The point of this page is to show why BackStageCommunication is used (it must offer advantages to individuals, otherwise they wouldn't do it) and how this may harm online-communities. But note that there is a difference between PrivateCommunication? and BackStageCommunication and that there may be situations where these are unavoidable.

Me.dium's collaborative browsing vision

When we wrote about Me.dium over four months ago, we described it as 'social browsing'. Perhaps a refinement of this would be collaborative browsing, and that would be a more precise definition of what the company is trying to do. At the heart of Me.dium is the idea that by enabling real-time discovery and communication during browsing, this will enable people to get things done faster and in ways not possible before.

During my interview with the company founders, we discussed the typical scenarios for using Me.dium:

• You and your friend are trying to accomplish a common task;


• You are trying to do something on your own and meet others who are trying to do the same thing;


• You are observing the patterns of crowds nearby and so you are able to discover new things.

So the $15M dollar question is what is Me.dium planning to do next? In a nutshell, the company is planning to spend the money on refining and scaling its sophisticated matching technology. The secret sauce here is in connecting people based on their browsing patterns.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.

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