Returning to conversations about conversations, and thinking about the business models contained within the technological, cultural and business conflicts between serendipity and inefficiency.

Yes, I follow (ok, stalk) many people using the web; but in many cases following people is merely my proxy for following conversations (even if “personal spam” threatens the attention economics); as I said on tumblr and flickr, giving props to Edward Harran for his note about following #hashtags:

[I'm] really looking forward to the day where following #hashtags (threads of conversations) is as easy as following people.

Perhaps the new BackType will be a step towards that?

“BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine. We index and connect online conversations from across the web in real-time, so you can see what people are saying about topics that interest you.”

As you may know, the topic of online conversations is one I’ve laboured over in various forms for over a year; highlighting a post from earlier this year created from a discussion with Michael Lewkowitz:

The openness of hashtags is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness; I believe using #hashtags will only be popular and well-understood when it makes economic sense for a person to use it; i.e. only when using a hashtags helps someone (promote themselves, be understood better, quicker, easier, help participate in a conversation) will people use them regularly with any rigor.

Meaning:

1) Given that the ability to understand the context of messages (micro- and macro-) through natural language search and contextual analysis (or through semantic web-type architecture) is difficult…
2) … we depend on users to use hashtags to self-identify important parts of messages….
3) … but there isn’t any real meaningful need for people to use hashtags until people can privately capture the externalities behind free public metadata.

Until threads are meaningful (e.g. public, searchable, indexed, promotable), #hashtags are useless.

To state the obvious, there is a business in structuring conversations and turning data into information and knowledge. Always has been, always will be; and the shifting economics of media will not destroy the fundamental need for relevance and context.

Creating relevance and context starts with organizing and structuring, the foundations for better lives and better business. Filters alone aren’t enough, for the simple reason that artificial intelligence can’t replace people; algorithms alone will not be the dominant strategy in niche media, but that’s not the point; combining people and algorithms to blend efficiency and serendipity by compressing better data is where the fun (and the business opportunities) lie. *

Thus media is not disappearing, but changing: splintering and mixing with communication and entertainment, highlighting why the disruption in how data, information and knowledge is created and distributed is really more of a technological and cultural issue than a business issue; and this is why the entertainment and media industries are canaries in the coal mine for many, many more industries.

So yes, I stalk people. But it’s for a good purpose.

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* Noted in the links, respectively:

• Jon Bischke, Content Publishers: I Have A Business Model For You
• Umair Haque, The Nichepaper Manifesto
• Chris Dixon, To make smarter systems, it’s all about the data:
  

  Algorithms are, as they say in business school, “commoditized.” The order of magnitude breakthroughs (and companies with real competitive advantages) are going to come from those who identify or create new data sources.

• Kevin Kelly, Extropy:
  

  Dematerialization is not the only way in which extropy advances. The technium’s ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial.

• Mike Masnick, It’s Not Just The Entertainment Industry Facing An Economic Upheaval