The Two day Expert

A couple of weeks ago, I spend around two days building a website, using WordPress, as a Content Management System (CMS). The idea behind the page was to make a prototype of a idea and gain experience with WordPress from scratch. I had to deal with common roadblocks that I find when dealing with LAMP Stack (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP).

While chatting Stavros (a friend) and told the above and he replied:

so, these 2 days made u an expert?

you should write a blog

the 2 days expert

He was kind off joking, however it made me ponder about expertise in building websites using CMS. You see, in theory many people “know” how to build a website using a CMS. Hosting companies had made a business on providing a cheap place ,with one click setups for Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and others. However during the process roadblocks appear, so what we do? We Google for it or subscribe to forums and ask. Now, with twitter and similar platforms people look for the solution there, either through search of keywords or just asking. So, for every roadblock there is search in various places on the Web. If it works we bookmark it and generally go there to look for more solutions. We continue like these, until we had finished and achieve our milestone or goal. Some may even blog about, to share their experience and note how it different from what they found on the Web.

Expert is define as “one with the special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject” by the Merriam Webster dictionary. The Internet gives you this ability to become a expert, anybody can do it, with a low barrier of entry. However it might take less time for a person, that already has done it various times. Nevertheless, once we do it we feel more comfortable the next time and even gain confidence to help other and “show off our expertise”.

The more you learn, the less you know and there will be always somebody with more experience than you. That doesn’t mean that in this age with access to all the information on the Web, you can’t be a expert in your own realm.

Let’s take for example Scrappy. He just rented some shared hosting from “Easy Hosting CMS” and installed Drupal. He uses power a site (scrappy.com) of his portfolio and his blog. After some issues, he was able to make it run after a four days of hard work. Scrappy is proud of his website and he shows it off to his friends and peers. A couple of week pass by and Lil Ed wants his own website. So, he asks Scrappy for help because he sees him as an expert, based on what he saw in scrappy.com. Even if Scrappy has only done it once, the perception it gives to people that don’t have an idea of actually how to do it: is that he is an expert.

If this was 1990, Scrappy will have had a hard time figuring a lot of things. He will need a bunch of books and ask a bunch of people. Today all this knowledge or expertise can be accessed and absorbed on the Internet. As a result, you will have a lot of “2 day experts” hanging around in communities. Now the questions is what are those that has been working with X topic for years? Even more, are they as important as they where 20 years ago?