Monday, March 31, 2008

You can't organise a conversation

I'm finally getting round to reading David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous in quiet moments here at Mobile Internet in Berlin.
Reminds me of a forum category we created on motorcyclenews.com when I was its editor: genera/general. We should have just called it miscellaneous.
You guessed it, it was by far the most used board among some 400+ forums.
Owing to the limits of our tech at the time, we had boards for each individual motorcycle model. There were other categories too, for different kinds of bikesport, biking leisure pursuits etc. Lots of centrally organised and selected pots.
But most people most of the time figured what they were about to say, or conversations they were tempted to join in with, were unclassifiable: general/general.
Conversation needs to self-organise.

No comments:

Post a Comment

FasterFuture.blogspot.com

The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?