Is that red face anger or embarassment?

One common complain about online interviewing is that you lose the emotional content. You can’t look the person in the eye, see if they are nervous, angry, upset or embarrased. It’s true that there is a meta-communication that takes place in an interview that doesn’t happen in the same way online. Language can be revealing, but not as revealing as tears or a red face. So there is some loss, but is anything gained at the same time?

There are some obvious benefits. The person you are interviewing may be nervous, or overly concerned with their appearance, or diction and as a result you may lose a lot in the way of content. Let;s face it, most people are not that comfortable with people they just met and have a dozen things on their mind to do with looking good rather than answering your questions. This does not really reflect who they are so much as it reflects how media savvy they are. The online interview does not get rid of this entirely, but it certainly puts them at much greater ease.

People are less likely to reveal certain personal details when someone is looking them in the eye. The less personal online medium can help to get interviewees to reveal more about themselves. That’s one of the reasons it can be so good for online dating.

Do you really know what they are thinking? The red face – what does it mean? Are they embarassed? Are they angry? Do they just have high blood pressure? Maybe it’s hot in the room? The assumptions that get made about meta-communication can be as wrong as they are right and interviewees are often appalled at how wrong interviewers get it.

So try it online and see how it goes.

Interviewing by the numbers

I’m curious whether anyone has any idea how many interviews are done online. It’s a hard one to figure out. Please feel free to offer your suggestions in the comments. Just to be clear, online interviews include email, IM and chat.

Truth is, it’s hard to even fathom how many interviews are performed on an annual basis. If you include everything from reporters to job interviews it has to be a vast number.

Does the kind of interview effect the medium? I assume it would. So it is likely that interviews for background research on a topic are commonly done in email whereas doctors interviewing patients is almost exclusively done in person.

Any help with quantification ideas would be most welcome. For an area that is so important to the way we communicate it seems woefully ignored.

YouSaidIt goes live!

Hello and thanks for coming to YouSaidIt.

Welcome to the world of interviewing online. We hope you find it good experience and that your interviewees and readers feel the same way. Please let us know how the experience is, good or bad by writing feedback@yousaidit.com. Thanks.

Since more and more interviews are conducted online and published online, we thought it made sense to improve the whole experience. In the process we think the nature of the interview itself will change, as has already started to happen. We want to be a part of the process of reinventing the interview and the technology that makes it an easier and better experience.

Interviewing is so intrinsic to the way we get information, educate people and entertain them, that it’s easy to forget that interviewing is a practice unto itself with varying techniques and formats. It’s used in everything from reporting in the news media to psychiatry, from celebrity interviews to job interviews, from political debates to expert panels.

We’ve been working on this product for quite a while. This first beta release of YouSaidIt reflects what we think are the basics of online interviewing, including elements for all the players: interviewer, interviewee, publisher and audience. You can see some of the features for each of these roles on our product page.

We hope to add a lot to the product in the coming months based on your input and feedback. If you want a closer relationship in the development of the product whether you are a publisher, interviewer, UI designer or developer we’d love to hear from you. We can give you access to our API as well.

We are really happy to be providing this service and looking forward to working with you.

Please feel free to email us personally too. You can reach me at charles -at- yousaidit.com