Earlier today I engaged in a conversation with an engineering team (software developers) on some information gathering related to some work we are doing. Generally when looking for information, there is always a bit of angst when the Google result set contains numerous links to Experts Exchange, none of which when clicked on can deliver the Google indexed content shown in the Google preview block. In our open concept development lab, the result of this activity is usually an impromptu “Damm Experts Exchange” from whomever is doing the research. Generally it is the type of folks that would fit well as a “Savant” or “Technocrat” in the Experts Exchange domain, but simply are too engaged in other package-specific support communities or more important endeavours to expend time and personal details to join the collective.
Following the “Damm” comes a predictable conversation, typically described as an Experts Exchange bashing forum. Today it took a bit of a twist, as the entire team was enlightened by this neat little greasemonkey script for Firefox that simply removes Experts Exchange links from the Google result set. The follow-up from one individual was “Well it’s not as good as buying them and shutting them down or doing a massive DDOS, but this will have to do… “. LOL
This is a great stop-gap until the day when our team feels the need to have an Experts Exchange badge on their resume, or there is inability to reach developers directly on older community technologies (IRC, mailing lists, etc.) as opposed to online forums.
On the flip side, reading the Experts Exchange wikipedia page is enlightening, and it certainly appears there is a lot more positive than negative energy and impact related to what goes on at Experts Exchange, so its a good thing for those born into the quick and easy world of “Google gets me what I want to know, every time.”
A good strategy to support the Experts Exchange community and enable team members that see Experts Exchange as evil might be to buy them a paid membership, however I am not entirely convinced this would do anything more then deteriorate the credibility of whomever decided this might be a good thing in the eyes of a seasoned developer.
