David Weinberger at Community 2.0

David Rocks. Best presenter I have seen in years.

Who is he? Technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which has been described as ‘a primer on Internet marketing.’ Weinberger’s work focuses on how the Internet is changing human relationships, communication, and society.

Key points on communication

• Broadcast era is ending, the one to many is decreasingly important.
• Youtube is social in that we point to them. I liked this, take a look. We point out to one another. Also not done talking – look at comments to YouTube videos, which in fact are conversation. One laughing baby video has 60,000 comments.
• Net allows us to create new ways of talking with one another, something impossible before. Now have 140 character conversation with Twitter.
• More interesting in talking with one another than anything. Look at conference program filled with great speakers and you’ll gravitate to cocktails and networking.
• Control doesn’t scale. Only way to do is ‘Be China.’ Only because control is taken out do things scale, ie, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube.

Evolution of how we find good stuff

• First order of organization. Put pictures in folders etc.
• Second order. Reduce rich info to a few lines of data describing. Card catalogue.
• Third order. We’re changing who organizes and how. No one can anticipate how someone will browse or look for stuff. Users, we, get to control the organization of stuff – imagine book store that allowed this. Amazon is good example of not having info organized in one way. Click on term or phrase in book and takes to other books with that term. Tags users have associated with book.

Front page of newspaper is paging

• Twitter. Go look at this. We keep up with people who are doing some very neat things. Also intimacy is built by detail.
• Emails. Go look at this.
• Digg. People vote on what others should look at.

Few more points

• Conversation about what someone said is smarter than the person who originally said something. Look at mail list conversation. Communities are smarter than individual, even if individual is very smart.
• Wikipedia scales. 2 million articles in 5 years. Britannica cannot do that. And it’s willingness allows you to post notices of neutrality, advertising etc makes it work. Admitting fallibility makes it your friend and makes it get better.
• Facebook, by messing up information and content, works. We overflow all the boundaries in Facebook and communities. And because we took away the boundaries, we allowed things to scale.

Conversation to Connection. Connection to Community.