[This is 5 days after the fact because I’ve been on the road.]

Tom Gerace of Gather.com is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunchtime talk. The company has raised about $9M, including an investment from Minnesota Public Radio. Jake Shapiro, in introducing Tom, says Gather is like “MySpace for grownups.” [Note: As always, I’m paraphrasing and summarizing in real time. As a result, I’ll get at least some of what Tom says wrong.]

User driven content is big, says Tom. MySpace has passed the NYTimes, AOL and CNN in reach and page views. “User-driven content is where user-driven retail was in the early days of eBay.” eBay let the community evaluation create credibility.

Now it’s easy to create content, Tom says. But how do you enable people to find the best content on a topic. Gather wants to do this for an audience that doesn’t know technology well. So, at Gather you can publish articles. To enable community-driven organization, you can create tags. You can publish for select groups of people, for organizations within Gather, or to anyone. Anyone can create a group for. Groups can be public or private, moderated or unmoderated. Groups are a content filter, Tom says, making sure you get focused attention on a topic.

Gather is working on being able to bring in content via RSS. And they will allow bookmarking of off-site content. Gather articles have permalinks, but you have to be a Gather member to comment.

There are about 20,000 members of Gather, 150,000 readers per week. They built membership via NPR. There are 36,000 unique tags.

There’s social network: Family, friends and colleagues. You can publish your content to any of those.

Articles are rated anonymously. Political articles tend to get rated by partisanship, not quality. So Gather is moving towards looking at standard deviations.

“We’re looking at letting our community own the community.” E.g., there is an open forum where people can tell Gather what they think, even though that might help Gather’s competitors. (On the back of Tom’s business card is the text of the First Amendment.)

“Community enforcement is an increasing focus” to handle tag-spammers, people not categorizing content as “adult,” and other ways of gaming the system. There’s a flagging system now. Gather needs this because Gather compensates contributors, sharing the ad revenue.

You will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for a particular author.

Tom says the focus is on finding and making available the best content. “We want to focus the community on the most interesting and best content.” Gather wants to reward the best authors. They’re thinking of assigning a default ranking to an article based on the author’s average ranking in order to keep people from seeing and ranking over and over an article they don’t like. They’re also playing with a “discover” facility to surface articles not yet popular. Also, there’s an editorial team that hand picks articles.

In response to a question, Tom says that Gather is not a “walled garden”: more than 90% of its content is available publicly. Adding RSS will help.

Demographic: 25-55 yrs. 55/45 f/m. They thought it’d be the NPR demographics but they’re skewing a little younger.

A power law distribution is developing: Some articles get lots of reads/comments, and then there’s a long tail.

Q: (me) The development of a power law distribution of readership of articles would be a sign that Gather is succeeding in locating good content, but it probably discourages community because most people won’t be highly read and thus may be discouraged.
Q: (Erica George) You could have lots of little communities, each with its own thought leaders.

A: The audience can comment and authors can react.
Q: But which is your vision of success — surfacing a relative handful of great aricles or enabling lots of small communities to emerge with their local favorites?

A: It’s up to the community. We let the community identify the best of the best. But we do focus visitors on what they’ve chosen.
Q: (Rebecca MacKinnon) But recruiting George Will isn’t bottom up…

A: Sure it is, because the community can decide whether he’s a thought leader.
Q: (Jake) Which way does your business model push you?

A: This is a true marketplace of ideas. The best contributors will rise to the top. No doubt people with brand recognition have an advantage, but because it’s community selected stuff, we hope it will find the highest quality stuff. My gut is that if you take 100,000s of people writing on a topic, one will write an article better than what the professionals are writing on any given day.

Q: (Erica) It’d be good for high-quality comments emerge as well.
A: I completely agree.

Q: How do niche sites do?
A: Initially we had an editorially-defined taxonomy and user tags. We’ve eliminated the taxonomy because everyone thought they had a new topic that they should be top level, but no two people ever proposed the same one. [Everything is miscellaneous :) ] People were using the tagging system five times more often than they were using the taxonomy. The tag system allows people to drill down into the site.

Q: Is there a novel type of discourse coming out of this?
A: Engaged, informed discussions. Not focused particularly on tech.

Our aim, says Tom, is to connect people around shared passions. Connecting people around the very best content on a topic is a great way to build community. [But the site is structured to surface a handful of the best authors. What effect will that have on community?] [Tags: gather tom_gerace everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

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