DLTQ.org

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?

Slightly over my level of discussion or comprehension about the nature and possible futures of the blogging world, Ross Mayfield discusses blogging as media outlets for the "powerful people, or people power".

While we should celebrate both forms as participation at scale we haven’t had before, we should recognize that these forms will converge.  They both involve human editing of a sort.  Aggregation is vertical information assembly where the editor codes.  Citizen’s media is horizontal information assembly where the editor, made even more clear in the Wikinews model that appends a more formal editorial process to the end of emergent practice.  The two will work in tandem.

This story just led my thoughts back to Balkan. I was in Serbia and Bosnia last month in connection with a seminar I co-organized on Education and Democracy in the West Balkans. The discussion areas — well, I will make a separate post on that seminar later on. In either case, while in Zajecar in eastern Serbia, I had a discussion with a guy, and that discussion really helped me understand some of the Major problems in the country. One of them is the lack of Real free media. Or, to put it more correctly: The lack of variety in independent media.

I wrote an article on that very point but somehow I cannot find the article in my outbox at the moment. I will edit this post later on, with a link to the article. While in Sarajevo during the seminar proper, I asked Mr. Rusmir Mahmutčehajić about his opinion regarding the independent media in Bosnia, and he basically said that there is none. All the media outlets are advocating some religious, economic or ethnical group. I will research this further and possibly contact Mr. Mahmutčehajić again by e-mail and ask for further comments.