Enjoying a rich offline life, continuing a couple thoughts about online conversations; in short, instead of creating new tools to publish knowledge, we need to focus on better tools for creating wisdom…
Michael Lewkowitz, Dead of Alive – the future of hashtags:
A couple of weeks ago, Scoble had a epiphany that ‘hashtags are dead…’. That epiphany was really more about realtime search than the future of hashtags. If anything, inline tags (hashtags) are going to be an increasingly important aspect of the realtime web.
… Hashtags are just the beginning of in-line tagging in public micro-messages. They will enable explicit threading and permissionless participation in the realtime web in a natural and extensible way. Chris Messina’s original post had some great details, some of which which I believe will be part of the core infrastructure of the realtime web. And as public micro-messaging services proliferate, inline tags will help enable cross-platform threading with the potential to weave the web and even our offline data.
I wouldn’t really call Scoble’s proclamation an “epiphany”; I don’t think we’ve ever used #hashtags terribly well.
The openness of hashtags is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness; I believe using #hashtags will only be popular and well-understood when it makes economic sense for a person to use it; i.e. only when using a hashtags helps someone (promote themselves, be understood better, quicker, easier, help participate in a conversation) will people use them regularly with any rigor.
Meaning:
1) Given that the ability to understand the context of messages (micro- and macro-) through natural language search and contextual analysis (or through semantic web-type architecture) is difficult…
2) … we depend on users to use hashtags to self-identify important parts of messages….
3) … but there isn’t any real meaningful need for people to use hashtags until people can privately capture the externalities behind free public metadata.Until threads are meaningful (e.g. public, searchable, indexed, promotable), #hashtags are useless.
What is the point of using tags to supply metadata around a conversation until we can use them to improve the conversation? The real value in data isn’t the data itself but in structuring it to help us understand and improve our lives.
Meaning: hashtags are a start, but what we really need are threads.
Information and “knowledge” is easy to find, but where is the wisdom?
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Of course, these aren’t new topics of mine; digging into the archives to highlight a couple related thoughts:
- Splintering Conversations, May 2008:
Instead of helping to solve the natural problem of communication that is called “being human”, online communication tools have only added to the complexity. Discontinuous. Fractured. Lack of context. Asynchronous communications scatter across our various inboxes, comments litter the web, incomplete conversations are lost amid the noise. Group conversations evolve, devolve, tune people out as the meanings and topics change, change from private to public to private.
… Social media has provided us a plethora of tools, devices, methods and new standards for communicating. We know these tools: they have infiltrated our personal and professional lives, changed the ways we live and interact. But we are still at the very early stages of learning how to use them.
- Are “Online Conversations really conversations”, Dec 2008:
Where is the tool that extracts meaning and not just knowledge?
… We’re a knowledge culture; in our race to create and acquire knowledge we’ve forgotten the meaning and power of wisdom.
Perhaps it’s impossible to create a web service to extract meaning and create wisdom; perhaps that’s why we need people and not just algorithms. Perhaps that’s why we still need to connect with individuals…
So, what do we do about it?
