Blogs Not Conversations.....

Richard Treadway has an interesting post and discussion about blogs as conversations...or not. He references Cluetrain....how can you not if you're going to start a dialogue on this topic.

But he says, "not really," we don't really have the right tools yet and that we have a lot of work to do before a really useful model emerges.

For example, he says: "take email for example. Remember those early email messages all in CAPS - why are you shouting? The flame test - would you have said that face to face? While an etiquette is emerging for the blogosphere, the tools needed to realize an effective conversation have a long way to go."

He continues:
"The reason the tools are lacking, I believe is that we have made the assumption that blog posts are messages and therefore we should operate on them like email. Today's aggregators all look like email readers. The problem in making this assumption is that we have mixed 2 fundamentally different communication types - conversations which are request-response and blogs which are publish-subscribe.

Effective conversations need to adhere to a request-response protocol. I say something you listen, you say something I listen. There are varying cadences dictated but the medium but essentially they remain a serial request followed by a response. Verbal conversations are immediate and prolonged silence will end them."

And:
"In order to converse you have to write back to the publisher and he/she must respond back to you. This is the conversation of the "letters to the editor." What's different from a Newspaper's "letters to the editor" and comments in blogs is that the latency is so low it approaches the cadence of a conversation."

It's another side of the argument. A conversation really. A thread. A point of view. While I agree, we are making a lot of progress. Faster than we did with email.