RD: Certainly, that is one of the insights that have come from social networks. Social network theory is being able to see, in terms of the social structure, how innovations get taken up. There has been some research recently by Duncan Watts which argues that this isn’t dependent on particular individuals, yet still, those people who are the first to explore and take up new innovations, are necessarily the ones that lead the way and start to influence others. So there is a, I wouldn’t use the word cognoscenti as such, because they are not necessarily the ones who know the most, but they are the ones who are trying things out and exploring, and have the influence to spread the word effectively.

MO: And the conversations that are taking place would you say that these are mostly about commodities or ideas?

RD: That is one of the key characteristics of this new interactivity: conversations- the fact that now that we are connected, these conversations are enabled, these conversations can be viewed publicly, you know the blogs and the way in which people can make points on blogs, reflect on whether you know somebody, or whether you don’t. It becomes a very broad space in which conversations in which people are agreeing, making new points or building on them, start to happen in a far broader and public forum. That’s one of the real powers of the connected world in which we now live.

MO: And the conversations themselves, would you say that they emerge from talking about products, commodities or do they also diverge into quite ideological space?

RD: The nature of the people that are engaged in these conversations is that they are very diverse. There are many different communities with different types of conversations happening. But in the main, these are people who are writing about what they are passionate about. You know for example that there is a whole segment of society that is very excited about new technologies, and so they tend to write about gadgets and devices which are just coming out. The key point in common across these different groups where conversations emerge, is that they are passionate. They spend their time to express their opinions and see what other people are reading and saying, and responding to them. This could be in politics or technology or the environment or other domains. These tools provide an opportunity for people to express their passions.

MO: If I can ask you a bit about news sites for a moment, both the social news sites and the mainstream ones, and they both have a gigantic community of bloggers (or people who are writing in commenting on the blogs of these sites.) Would you go as far as to say that there are anchor bloggers or people who are key bloggers, who are directing opinions, particularly within the news sites, the social media news sites, and the mainstream ones?

RD: I think there is a distinction to made here. One space is the blogs. And the other is the social media sites, social news sites or social book marking sites such as digg and techmeme and so on. There are different characteristics to those two domains. In the blogs, the structure of the blogs means that there is a real focus of attention on a relatively small domain. One of the issues is that of the long tail. People often misunderstand the long tail. To understand the long tail you must know that there are different types of networks, and there is a particular type of network which is called scale free, which essentially means that it has the same structure whether it is small or its large.

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