Last week there was
a panel discussion at Supernova 08 on "Liquid Conversations", to wit:
....about how personal content, text, video and comments can be separated from individual websites and shared across the net and personalized.
In other words trying to justify why comments left on your blog should actually be allowed to flow to somewhere else - i.e. go to someone else's aggregator service to make them rich, not you. This is explained most succinctly by
Dave McClure:
i think there's a really interesting conversation (heh) that's becoming more important around the role of what i call the Comment DJ Mashup Artist, or the Share Pimp -- that is, not the person who creates original content, but rather the person who promotes / shares / pimps it out to other audiences, whether that be via Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, Facebook News Feed, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare, embeds, etc etc.
...but this can be done without moving the original content! In fact, strictly speaking, these "liquid" conversations are in fact thixotropic - ie they only flow if forced to - left to their own devices they would stay on the blogs, but give em a squeeze and they flow elsewhere, to the Share Pimp....who thus gets the lions share of link love, pageviews, Ad revenues etc. I absolutely get why there is a conversation about this!
And this property will generate more Plasma (hot air) conversations in the future, as TechCrunch notes:
One big issue with all of the different conversation aggregators is around the ownership of comments. When you post a comment to a blog, who owns that comment? Many of these services directly copy the comments off and will place them within their own applications - so the question is how copyright and ownership works in these instances (in the same way that it isn’t kosher to completely copy a complete blog post, it shouldn’t be kosher to copy a complete comment)
Also, call me
Nick Carr, but I fail to see what is in this for the Original Content Producer (aka Blogger) - who has thus been relegated here to the role of digital sharecropper. In fact I can imagine a lot more Plasma Conversation (aka superheated air) will be generated by these liquid conversations once bloggers understand who gets the bulk of the value they are creating!
In addition, as a user of these aggregation services I have noticed that "liquid" conversations are generally not as solid as a good blog conversation, ie they do not lead themselves to the more considered arguments one sometimes sees on blogs, but are more a series of one liners + karma points.
Still, they are better than the vaporous conversations one sees on Twitter for example.
No, rather than liquid conversations, what we want to see are Visco-Elastic Conversations, that can flow but return to where they started.
