I can see where Andy's coming from. Free info doesn't make expertise. You still need the aptitude, skill, and desire to use the info to do groovy things. That's where the Age of Expertise comes in.
Compelling post. I've got an answer for your final question about Google versus help:
Search technology is second only to email for usage by the entire internet audience. It's been adopted and is now the norm. I think that's a great deal of why people love to Google versus examine online help.
It could also be about how people's learning methods differ. My mom, an educator herself, won't read any help file (neither will my girlfriend for that matter) yet they don't hesitate to call me for any product support.
You strike a great chord about the friction between tech support (real-time, direct information exchange) and technical writing (static, searchable and hyperlinked content).
Last month I did a post on wikipedia usage within a corporation and this is very relevant to the online collaborative workspace.
There's a sweet spot in there that reduces customer call volume, and actually increases consumer confidence in the product.
Somewhere, the majority of the people will find the answers the majority of the time and mentally rate the support system a success.
Again, killer article. This one spoke to me. And I'm not easy to impress.
Great post Sarah - thought provoking with nifty categorizations for information channels.
One reaction I had to the predicted coming of the "age of expertise" is that net-generation people (aged 2 to 22) apparently eschew expertise and prefer to take in dizzying amounts of information. From http://www.growingupdigital.com/, "N-Geners are not viewers or listeners or readers. They are users. They reject the notion of expertise as they shift through information at the speed of light by themselves, for themselves." That generation can consume information at an awesome rate. (I'm raising one of their kind now, plus one who's under age 2, hee.) So I believe that there is still a demand for information, but perhaps the pricing of information will be in time rather than money. (Both are the only scarcities as one of the comments on the oreilly.com post noted).
I sent this post out to several colleagues, one of whom is a director-level manager for a tech pubs department. She asked an excellent question - how does this shift in valuing information vs. expertise help you determine the right amount of investment in tech doc? We all agreed there is a professional baseline that must be met. For example, when you buy a US$75,000 car, there had better be a nice looking manual in the glove compartment regardless of whether you ever open the manual to solve a problem (or just hire the expert mechanic). But how can a tech pubs department sell themselves as the expert mechanic when their deliverable is the manual? The car metaphor gets silly after a while (or maybe right away, ha ha), but it is a great question - for years tech pubs has tried to determine (and convince others) how much to invest in tech pubs. How does the expense and value proposition change during this incredible time of increasing information? I need to write this up as a blog post rather than taking up so much comment room, but would love to hear thoughts on that very question.
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