Can we talk?
Forgive me for being a continuing contrarian. . .
Ernie posts a piece called "Anatomy of a conversation among weblogs", which describes a speech, a news story, and a subsequent series of postings on several weblogs and comments to those postings. This is purported to be an example of how weblogs are realizing the promise of the World Wide Web by "facilitating conversations" among lawyers from California to Belgium.
Well, I disagree. I think that the series of episodes that he uses typifies the fact that weblogs are a remarkably clumsy and awkward way to hold a "conversation". More to the point, they show that the metaphor of a conversation is simply inapt when applied to weblogs. No one would normally use the term "conversation" to describe a process where one person talks in one location and then another responds somewhere else, and the first person never knows that the response was made unless he goes to look for it, someone tells him about it, or he happens upon it in his travels. The first person has to take special steps to go and look for the response, or he has to use and configure special software which will "push" the response to him. Even a comment made by a visitor to a weblog is not displayed with the original posting; the visitor is required to use a link to search it out.
A series of postings on a mailing list or on a web-based message board could be considered to be analogous to a "conversation", although the true electronic analogue of a conversation would be the instant messages that my daughters send to their friends -- if they ever had anything of substance to say. Hell, Usenet has been an internet conversation for more than twenty years.
A weblog has some virtues and some vices. A "conversation" it is not.
6:17:05 PM 
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