Mar 13, 2008
The depth of conversation
I am listening to a podcast interview with me that Mark from Citizen Reporter recorded when he was here in Copenhagen some time ago. Although I hate listening to my own voice, I liked the discussion.
One of the problems that was discussed in this interview was depth of conversations. How do we enable deeper conversations on the net?
How do we let these media bits and bytes build into larger organisms? Something that can be tweaked and tuned and remixed into new constellations. Something that can swiftly – and swiftly is the key here – be used again and again in new contexts, while also linking back to the sources.
In Mark’s podcast he also wrote:
In many ways this podcast is an extension of the arguements and discussions brought forth in my podcast with Jay and Ryanne as well as with John Aravosis last December.
Where are the links? Well, I found the podcasts he mentioned: The podcast with Jay and Ryanne is here, while the talk with Aravosis is here.
Now, if the discussion I had with Mark is in the same thread as those others, one must assume that there are tons of other threads. Must be literally hundreds of blog posts out there that touch on the same vein, from different perspectives. How could the people who do not know many of these, but listen to the Citizen Reporter podcast and want to learn more – move on? Do we google a sentence? Browse a blogroll and do searches on the different blogs?
So, Mark, my challenge to you (and me) now is: Let’s gather and display a “Conversation Depth 101″ page with useful links, perhaps some quotes, and perhaps pointing at best practice out there. What do you think?
“How do we let these media bits and bytes build into larger organisms? Something that can be tweaked and tuned and remixed into new constellations. Something that can swiftly – and swiftly is the key here – be used again and again in new contexts, while also linking back to the sources.”
Great stuff! I agree that this is a key challenge. I have one answer, although it is much easier said than done : create more rich contexts, where more advanced filters may evolve, some of these socially produced, others more mechanical of nature. Wikipedia and pages on Wikipedia are examples of beginnings of these kind of rich contexts with advanced filters.
This can enable people to quickly locate information they need, and even find information they didn’t know they needed. Contrary to search, which is always a very conscious affair. Already, I often find stuff faster via sites such as Wikipedia and del.icio.us than on Google, especially if my query is a little more specific, or if it is, but I have too little to go on, in order to really search for it.
How do we do this? By giving these kind of hubs a business model. They don’t have one now. At Kaplak we will provide one model for sites/contexts like these – which will help information producers as well as the context hubs, mediators and filters.