The Listbook
The Listbook (url: http://www.thelistbook.com) went live on 26th July 2010. It gives everyone the opportunity to share their knowledge and views with an eager audience in that most appealing and familiar of forms – the list. Whether top tens are your thing or you prefer to go for something a little more expansive, the Listbook gives you the opportunity to showcase your mental wares. The site is simple to use and has an ethical stance concerning your personal information.
The lists you contribute will then be spliced and diced, ranked, rated and shared, earning you points and badges and giving you the chance to see if what you’ve written has gone down well or crashed and burned. The most popular lists and authors are featured on the home page, promoting your content and making you famous. When more than one list on the same topic is submitted List 0 is automatically created – aggregating the content to create a master list with items ranked by popularity, giving you the chance to see how your opinions match up with the crowd’s.
This ambitious local start-up has dreams of becoming one of the UK’s biggest online success stories by providing a valuable and entertaining resource. Authors have already taken the opportunity to write some local lists, submitting their favourite Gloucestershire tourist spots for others to rate.
“theListbook.com introduces a fun, competitive element to the idea of collecting together knowledge on a large scale,’ said Listbook founder Robert Colquhoun. ‘Our goal is to build a fantastic resource based on user-contributed lists that are both informative and entertaining, as well as incentivising users for participating. We hope that the users will spur each other on to come up with exciting new lists as they see originality and quality information being rewarded by their peers.”
The team was given a helping hand by a group of students from the University of Gloucestershire. The group was granted exclusive early access to the site in exchange for their views and feedback.
If the rise of the internet, and more specifically social media, has taught us anything, it is that people love to share what they know or, perhaps more accurately, what they believe to be true. Whatever the reason, the need to share information and express opinion with our online communities appears to be inescapable.
The popularity of the list format may be explained by some research conducted by psychologist George Miller in 1956. He discovered that when people are asked to recall a list of objects viewed for a short amount of time and then removed, the average number remembered was almost always somewhere between 5 and 9. His resulting research paper, titled ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information’, is one of the most famous psychological studies ever and plays an important role in our understanding about short-term memory.
Like online encyclopedia site Wikipedia, the Listbook crowdsources the wisdom of its contributors for the benefit of every visitor. But by placing equal weighting on fact and opinion the team hope they have created a site that is as entertaining as it is useful. The Listbook is a level playing field where everyone’s opinion is equally valid and nobody is excluded from contributing if they have something to get off their chest.
The Listbook truly harnesses the wisdom of crowds to create a democratic collaboration of the many for the many. A thousand individual lists are interesting, informative and entertaining – aggregated they become really useful, sharing knowledge and opinion, and through these shared interests powerful social search and research opportunities are created.
The search is on to find backers to fund an ambitious development project that will see the central site functions expanded and adapted to include the development of their knowledge aggregation system and increased social capability for their users.