John Hassell: Pharmalot – “It’s the Wisdom of the Crowd Around Him…How Do You Take that to the Next Level?”

Ed Silverman, editor of Pharmalot has the luxury of working only online. But don’t think that means he slacks off. One look at the blog and you’ll realize that Ed is "a machine," as his editor John Hassell noted.

John and Ed are looking into different ways to utilize social bookmarking sites or social news sites to tap into the wisdom of the crowd that has grown around Ed’s blog. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

So what do you want to accomplish?

Ed has been blogging for a little over a year,  Pharamlot just had its birthday, and in many ways he has approached doing this with a lot of the same thoughts that are driving the beat blogging project. He wanted this to be a collaborative experience and to develop relationships with his sources.

It seems to us that there are other opportunities, using various new technology platforms and services to find other ways for Ed to connect with other sources. He would be the first person to tell you it’s the wisdom of the crowd around him that makes the blog work. The question is, how do you take that to the next level?

What are the realities you face in the newsroom?

Ed is covering an industry in and around people in the industry. The trick is to have a relatioship with sources, understanding that many people in any industry are not always free to speak publicly about what they know or think. So how do you harness the wisdom of the crowd that can’t always speak publicly to other members of the crowd? That’s what we have been wrestling with.

Step one to go in that direction is to come up with some kind of a network of people who know this stuff inside and out who can share what they consider important — either by name or not.

We will also set up a Twitter feed of headlines from Pharmalot and Ed will interact with readers that way.

I’m not sure that we need a full social network. I don’t want to be closed off to doing a full fledged site if it makes sense, but at the moment I don’t see that as the best way to approach this. Between the RSS feed and emails Ed has a long list of sources and people he can tap and direct at any time, so the network is there. He has the ability to throw questions out there and get responses.

The really simple thing to do is get a group of 30 people and put them in a forum, but I don’t want to do that.

We want to give readers access to what some group of knowledgeable people believe to be important at any moment of time – and we are looking at various tools in the social recommendation, social bookmarking realm to accomplish that and we are hoping to move on that soon.

What is the technical support like?
Whatever we decide to do with the blog we can do. Pharmalot is hosted externally, we do all the design and development. It’s really one guy who does it all – and works closely with Ed.

As soon as we are ready to something — it will happen really quick. If we were doing this on another project we might not have that same flexblity or freedom – but we are very lucky.