Distributed Conversation

April 28th, 2008 | by Brad King |
A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2.Image via Wikipedia

There’s been talk in the blogosphere about the effect of lifestreaming applications on blogs and traditional media companies.

Forget the advertising issues that RSS raises, for instance. What’s ultimately more important is tracking the conversation that begins in one place across multiple networks, making sure that you are somehow aggregating what people are talking about in one place (or, more likely aggregating the conversation in multiple places, in real time, so that people can read what is happening — and comment back — wherever they are.)

This is a fundamental Web 2.0 issue: multi-aggregation and participation.

The folks at Read/Write Web have a profile on YackStream, an application designed to meet some of the needs.

This raises an interesting question for traditional media companies: Do you REALLY want to know what’s going on?

These comment-streaming systems will completely remove the control that traditional media companies have — and it brings up a few interesting points to ponder.

  1. Right now, if there’s a post that violates the TOS, for instance, companies can easily remove them. With a comment-stream, I would assume that would happen.
  2. Do you trust a media outlet that scrubs comments that exist in another place because you don’t like what is being said.
  3. Do you censor the feed from another site?

I’ll be dollars to donuts that most traditional media companies wouldn’t have the gumption to included a decentralized system of comment control. I’ve heard too many stories — and I participated in a few of those fights (I lost) where bosses had me remove so-called derogatory comments from the site.

This is the ultimate (for now) in democratization of the conversation, allowing anyone to follow or participate from their own location. It also does more to enhance the dialogue.

Of course, there could be a serious culture clash if a discussion begins in multiple places, each with different audience expectations, and ends with everyone screaming in one room.

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