Blogging Sucks for Conversation. A rant over at Hunting the Muse entitled "Blogging Sucks for Conversation", talking about the difficulty of supporting conversation in a person-centric instead of thread-centric envirnment:

We've got it all wrong. We're all sitting here with our weblogs posting little idea-lets onto our weblogs, waiting for people to come to our weblogs for unrelated reasons. Then maybe they'll read our thoughts and respond.

Basically, we're making the conversation subservient to the posts. Shouldn't it be the other way around? [more...]

[Corante: Social Software]

Using weblogs for conversations is one purpose but not its main one, in my opinion. IM or emails are conversation. Weblogs help disperse information, allowing humans to interact with it and create knowledge. Weblogs allow tacit information to become explicit and vice-versa. Instead of taking days or weeks for useful information to move around, it can now be done in minutes or seconds. Conversations, as such, are secondary. Most other forms of dialog on the internet end up with huge amounts of noise and very little signal. Weblogs overcome this by a virtuous cycle. If what I write is of no interest, if it provides absolutely no information that is worth dispersing, if its noise level is high, no one will read it or link to it. It will die, become closed off in its own Universe. If I disperse useful information, if my signal is strong, my weblog lives and grows. Weblogs plus news feeds reduce the friction of information dispersal to insignificant levels. The information can be novel, created by the weblogger, or it can be a useful juxtaposition of several facts. The interplay of tacit and explicit information in a weblog is what makes its existence unique. Dialogs and conversations are best carried on with other tools.  10:42:19 PM    

Our New World.

Two opinions on the world that is emerging around us.

Ray Ozzie: "What's incredibly exciting to me is that a confluence of factors e.g. ubiquitous computing, networking, web and RAD technologies, the state of the job market - in essence, loosely coupled systems and loosely coupled minds - have created what amounts to a petri dish for experimentation in systems for social network formation, management and interpersonal interaction. An exciting time to be exploring what may happen to social structures, to organizations and to society when the friction between our minds can be reduced to zero ... to the point where we can truly have superconductive relationships."

Kevin Werbach: "As distribution has gotten even cheaper, the same trends have allowed Japanese cultural artifaces such as Pokemon to dominate America. The Net gives local and independent content creators the ability to compete against the domainant corporate media, not by building walls but by leveling the playing field. And just around the corner is the greater leveler of all: ubiquitous unlicensed wireless communications."

The one thing that is happening is that the developments of email. IM, blogs, SMS, social software is allowing for non-linear relationships - both in personal lives as well as in business. This translates into a 10x increase in the transactions that we are now doing daily as compared to a decade ago. This is the opportunity for software - how to help us manage this exponential increase in what we individually have to track and manage. Think of it as Moore's Law applied to our personal lives.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

Just as every other tool we have ever created magnifies our own abilities, computational tools are now doing the same thing for our personal interactions. We may be hardwired to deal with no more than 150 people in a social network, but the right tools can enhance this number greatly. A lever properly placed allows us to move the world effortlessly. The proper software tool allows us to disperse knowledge frictionlessly over a network of thousands. This is what is developing, its emergent properties just starting to become apparent to those of us who are looking. In five years, these tools will seem old hat. That is how quickly the world is moving.  9:13:45 PM