RD: Certainly there are many people who are trying to get value from this emerging domain, and some who are. As a broad generalisation, those who are doing the best are the ones who are engaging on the terms of this new emerging social media space, in terms of being passionate, engaging in conversations, agreeing, disagreeing, building, creating value for the community. I think that creating value for the community is what is most likely to create value for the participant.

There are many commercial enterprises that are trying to create blogs, that are trying to create positive impressions or spamming comments or trying to get links to their product sites and so on, but none of this is really having a positive impact. Sometimes it has a very negative impact. Those that are most successful are the ones that are really participating with the intent of creating value for the community, as well as themselves.

MO: And may I ask you. What do you see emerging on the web in a very broad sense?

RD: Well many things. A few things to point to. One is the extension of what people were describing when Web 2.0 emerged. Broad group participation leads to emergent collective outcomes - many people participate and unexpected things are created out of that which are of value to the community. We can find more easily what we want. There are more interesting things created. This is just the beginning of that whole domain. A key mechanism is that people are exposing more and more of their behaviours. Del.icio.us is a good example, where people can see what what other people find interesting. People are able to see what is relevant to themselves and to other people with similar profiles. So group participation that creates collective results is going to go a lot further.

One of the other key domains is around identity. We are just beginning to see some of this whole issue of being able to define and expose our identity in appropriate ways. This is a critical foundation for everything else. When we see a comment on eBay about other people, you want to know who made that comment. What is their motivation behind the comment? Can you trust that source? This goes into a far broader domain, which is reputation.

Something that I think will emerge over the next decade or so, is reputation as a key foundation to the internet. We have already seen that in, for example, how the authoritativeness of bloggers is assessed by how many and which people deem thier work valuable. We are going to see more and more a collection, an aggregation of people’s perceptions to assess people’s reputation in a particular context. Whether or not to trust them or to place faith in them.

MO: Ross, would you tell me where you would like see things going. In what direction would you like to see change happening?

RD: I think there are things which are very positive. I’ve been blogging for getting on to 5 years now and I’ve always believed strongly in the whole idea of blogs and collaborative filtering and so on, but it has actually progressed far faster than I thought. I have been surprised by how mainstream blogging and associated technologies have become in a relatively short space of time. I think the example of del.icio.us I mentioned before is a fantastic one. Not long ago people put their favourite bookmarks on their PC. Only they would see it.

Now we are very rapidly shifting to a world where a large proportion of people are making their bookmarks available to everybody. This sharing is creating an entirely new space which is immensely valuable. This collective value is very rapidly unfolding. It is extraordinary that it all seems to be happening now.

Page 6 of 6 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 3 4 5 6 | Next