Look at the Long Tail for the highest-value conversations

Excerpt: Where do you think creativity and innovation is born? And where do you think that the best-match conversations about the things you are interested in are taking place? The answer is: in Long Tail conversations!

[UPDATE, July 29, 2007: Whoa, I just noticed on Technorati that it's Doc Searls' birthday today. Happy "round" birthday, Doc! (I just celebrated my 40th on 070707)]

Not perfectly sure how and why Doc Searls associates my excerpts from the Cluetrain Manifesto with Ben Peters' talk about close reading of text (particularly since I haven't heard Ben's talk), but I hope he means he can see that I've read the cluetrain closely  :-)

Doc: "1) I haven't read the book in years;"

I was somewhat suprised to read that, although surely the contents of the book are so much part of Doc's being that in practice, he may never really feel the need to go back and look things up. (I do.)

Doc: "2) There's a lot of good stuff in there;"

*Only* good stuf, I dare say.

Doc: "3) The future, as William Gibson said, is not evenly distributed."

Indeed. Some of us live it today, some will tomorrow, others never will.

Doc: "Looking through the long pile of comments [on the Cluetrain's signatories page], most strike me as overly optimistic... and now, anachronistic. (...)

[Dom DeBellis says (...) ...Um, are you listening?] - In too many cases the answer is still "Not yet"."

Doc, I'd love to read your views on why the cluetrain comments strike you as anachronistic. Sure, we've had a dot-com fallout, we now have social media, and we are living post-911. But the Walls of Fort Business have certainly not come down - which indeed rather supports your perception of the cluetrain comments as being "overly optimistic".

But anachronistic?

"Although there is no demand for messages, there is a tremendous demand for good conversation," Doc wrote on page 95 of the book.

At the corporate communications team with the global company that I work for, I keep telling people that the Cluetrain is just as timely today as it has ever been. Especially with control-obsessed babyboomers, the elegant simplicity of Hugh MacLeod's porous membrane only rarely seems to strike a chord.

While it may very well be inevitable and happening as we speak, it could easily take another generation change in management before business at large will really appreciate not only the inevitability, but also the value proposition that our return to the Conversation of the Bazaar brings along.

What I am currently trying to get my head around is to combine learnings from the cluetrain and the Long Tail theory, with a view to applying those learnings to online conversations.

There must be tremendous value in niche conversations.

When we search on a certain topic, we are usually directed to the mainstream conversations around that topic. The media coverage and blog entries that are most linked to, i.e. are most amplified, are the ones that rank highest in Google results.

Similarly, the bloggers that are most linked too are the ones that build "authority" on Technorati, and their contributions to *any* conversation will rank them high in search results. Social rating such as on Digg is just another way to amplify (parts of) conversations. The same thing goes for social bookmarking on, say, del.icio.us.

 

Amplification does NOT get me closer to the conversations that are most relevant to *me*.

What amplification does is that it influences the position of particular pieces of content, or contributions to conversations, on the horizontal axis of the Long Tail graph. Amplified content moves up towards the Head, while other contributions slide down the Tail. And when we search, we are hardly ever directed to any long-tail, niche conversations.

But where do you think creativity and innovation is born? And where do you think that the best-match conversations about the things you are interested in are taking place? The answer is: in Long Tail conversations!

So what I am working on is an approach that allows us to detect and engage in conversations that are most valuable to us, by separating the wheat from the chaff, all the way down the Long Tail.

After all, as Dave Winer pointed out last month: It's time to open op networking, again:

"Eventually, soon I think, we'll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn't happened yet, but..."

Does any of this make sense at all?