Keeping Pace with the XBRL Conversation

Written by Bob Schneider     Posted on October 15, 2009

Three years ago keeping up with developments in the XBRL world was fairly simple: create a Google Alert for keyword XBRL, do periodic searches in a couple of engines, and sign up for daily digests from the XBRL Public Yahoo group.

Social media’s emergence, along with the creation of new XBRL-related blogs and websites, has made the XBRL conversation much richer, but it has also made it more difficult to track. In addition to the microblogging site Twitter, which generates a continuous stream of XBRL info and chat, there are XBRL groups in social media services like LinkedIn and Facebook, and several multi-purpose XBRL sites and aggregators — including XBRLSpy, XBRLBlog, and XBRL Network — have been inaugurated or upgraded. Although a little diminished by all the competition, the XBRL Public group remains alive and well.

Among these innovations, the most important has been Twitter. I now continually monitor Twitter Search results for XBRL because most XBRL-related blog posts, articles, events, and the like get mentioned here in some way. Occasionally, however, something noteworthy — like an interesting thread on the XBRL Public group — does go unnoticed, so I still haven’t abandoned any of the search methods I used three years ago.

What’s more, the 140-character-or-less tweet suffices to alert you to what’s happening in the XBRL world, but as a forum for developing XBRL themes and debating ideas, it has its limitations.

For example, recently, in response to CFO.com’s somewhat mixed appraisal of XBRL, a quick-witted observer tweeted “Vendors 1 | Everyone else 0.” It was the perfect tweet: pithy, clever, penetrating. It also seemed worthy of a detailed rejoinder, though, to dispute the notion that XBRL vendors were the primary drivers for the adoption of a data standard that now has been embraced for financial reporting by most major nations. But such a response would have taken more than 140 characters, and in the Twitter environment it also would have been unseemly and maybe unfair. After all, a tweet like “Vendors 1 | Everyone else 0” was just an imaginative quip on the topic of the moment, not a sweeping indictment of the XBRL movement. (Or was it?...)

My real concern about Twitter, however, is that its immediacy and brevity will lead to more tweets and fewer articles, blog posts, and blog comments. Twitter is fine for providing a link to an Internet resource or sharing a sweet bon mot, but it’s not a venue for sustained argument and debate.

Turning to Facebook, the other social media outlet that has made a huge splash, I have to admit I still don’t get it. I can’t comprehend a service whose taxonomy classifies my niece, college roommate, and business acquaintances all as “friends,” nor can I contemplate a conversation that simultaneously would be appropriate to all of them.

Facebook does have groups for those with similar interests, however, and currently there are a couple for XBRL; the main one has about only 50 members, and it’s fairly inactive.

In contrast, LinkedIn has numerous XBRL groups. Several have more than a hundred members, and some have as few as three. There’s some good stuff here. A few months ago, Dan Roberts published a short post on LinkedIn’s XBRL Matters group. Like Dan’s contributions to this blog, it was filled with interesting insights on relevant topics and themes: SEC Commissioner Mary Schapiro’s “not the picture of enthusiasm” comments on interactive data; XBRL as “background, infrastructure” that could be “better served by [the SEC] taking it off the front page,” and so forth.

All the same, I wonder how many people who would be interested in Dan’s post got to see it. While the XBRL Matters group does include many of the top names in the XBRL field, it still has no more than 200 members. And while Google does a good job of indexing LinkedIn profiles, I don’t see much evidence that it indexes LinkedIn group posts with the same efficiency.

Google also doesn’t seem to index messages of the XBRL Public group on Yahoo. (To be fair, Yahoo itself doesn’t seem to make much of an effort.) That’s a shame, because this group shows the XBRL community at its best. If you post a question, you’ll find the likes of Charlie Hoffman, Walter Hamscher, and Hugh Wallis answering it. Sure, if your query is “Can anybody here tell me what XBRL is?” you will be quickly and unceremoniously dispatched. But everyone who posts comments of import is treated with courtesy, and there continue to be some great debates. (One quibble: participants often aren’t fastidious about clipping quoted text, which makes it cumbersome to read a daily digest with a long thread.)

As you can see, there’s no shortage of XBRL venues in which to learn about XBRL and make your voice heard. But is the XBRL community best served by this “let a hundred flowers bloom” environment? I’m not sure.

Certainly different platforms are suitable for different users and purposes, and the variety is mostly welcome. But as I’ve indicated, I’m worried that, (1) the appeal of publishing real-time one-liners in Twitter will displace more detailed commentary; (2) the proliferation of groups and forums makes users wonder where to contribute; and (3) a lot of good content isn’t being seen because it’s not being indexed.

With the speed at which the Internet proceeds, however, my suspicion is that these concerns already are being addressed, and solutions and alternatives won’t take long to appear.