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how trackback improves a market conversationhow trackback improves a market
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 I've been at a conference for the last couple of days, and have spent a significant portion of that time eavesdropping on conversations. Aside from the obvious observations (that most people don't listen, and that men do most of the talking and interrupting in mixed company conversations) what most astonished me was the unintended lack of politeness and courtesy that seems to characterize most conversations. It's not that the participants are rude -- it's just that they seem to lack mutually-understood and mutually-respected protocols to govern conversation in a civilized manner. This, in a world in which we are beleaguered by rules in almost everything else we do, seems remarkable to me. So I did a bit of research to see whether I could find some protocols, some rules of behaviour, that work effectively regardless of the number, gender or conversational style of the participants. The longest-established protocol is also, it seems, the most misunderstood. This is the protocol of the Talking Stick, which has its roots in aboriginal American culture and in that of some third-world cultures as well. The basic rules of the Talking Stick protocol, from what I can ascertain, are as follows:
It is not clear to what extent the Law of Two Feet applies in Talking Stick circles -- where if you find the discussion valueless or frustrating you have the option to leave, without repercussions, and perhaps start another conversation on the same or another subject with those similarly inclined. The alternative would be to assume that if you chose to accept the invitation to join the conversation in the first place, you owe the rest of the group the courtesy of giving them your attention until it is finished. My personal view is that this judgement (whether leaving a conversation you find tedious is discourteous or not) is best left up to the individual. I have witnessed many 'moderated' conversations, where one person decides who will speak next, or where people raise their hands to be next to speak and a first-come, first-served honour system applies, and found them mostly frustrating. But anarchy, where the loudest voice always prevails, seems to me even more so, and also unfair. Where the participants are part of a hierarchy, and rank clearly determines speaking priority, the result is too often not really conversation at all, but rather an information reporting and instruction exercise. I have witnessed, too, meetings that allow the listeners to use tacit signals to prompt the speaker without interrupting them: Holding up a green card means "I like what you're saying", a red card the opposite, and a yellow card signals "I don't understand what you're saying". They tend not to work, I think, because the green encourages unnecessary loquaciousness, the red is rarely used because it would be perceived as rude, and the yellow is rarely used because it might make the listener appear stupid. Electronic equivalents (IMs that the speaker can read on-screen while talking) present the same discouragements, and also are more of a distractions than most speakers can handle on the fly. One of my favourite conversational formats is the interview/Q&A, where one (or more) persons pose questions and the other(s) restrict themselves to answering them. There is a certain inherent democracy in such conversations -- each side gives up certain speaking rights in return for receiving others. Unrehearsed, they require considerable skill and agility to pull off eloquently. Rehearsed, they can be extremely effective at transferring knowledge but they become less conversations than performances. So my sense, based more on observations of what doesn't work than what does, would be that the use of a Talking Stick or similar icon might be very helpful, even in two-person conversations (to reduce propensity to interrupt). I'm ambivalent about whether passing the Stick clockwise or allowing anyone to grab it next providing they satisfactorily summarize the last speaker's message first, would work better -- and I suspect it would depend on the subject and the conversational style of the participants. I do like the idea of using a subtle timer to reinforce the importance of clarity and brevity, which seem so absent in most modern conversations that the resulting incoherence is often unintentionally hilarious to the eavesdropper. Beyond that, I'm not partial to any 'improvements' to the basic four-rule Talking Stick process described above. What's worked for you? Have you tried using such techniques, and when are they effective (and not)? Are there other techniques, newer or older, that work better, and when are they appropriate? And what of telephone and Skype conversations, or those anarchic multi-party IM sessions? Could a 'virtual Talking Stick' be introduced to organize such conversations? It should be easy enough for the technology to handle, but has anyone actually tried imposing this kind of discipline on non-face-to-face conversations? And perhaps most important, does practice using these techniques tend to make more polite, respectful and articulate conversations second nature? Or is there some reason I'm missing why interruption and 'louder voices prevail' protocols are so prevalent in our conversations, seemingly by default? |
Today I looked at my list of contacts in AIM and knew Jerry Kindall was the l33t applescript developer of the bunch. I showed him my previous post, went off to grab a burrito for lunch only to find a working script in my inbox upon return. I just tried it out and it's working as I speak, with output identical to the winamp pings. The full instructions and applescript are included:
Jacques Distler: The anonymous nature of the internet makes the problem of “identity” a hard one. In physics, when we encounter an intractably-hard problem, our most frequent dodge is to redefine the problem to one which admits a solution, and hope that the result is a “good-enough” stand-in for the original problem. In that spirit, I (re)defined the problem as reliably associating comments posted with the websites of the commenters.
Just a suggestion: a lesser, but very much related and much more tractable, problem is trackbacks. The reason why it is more tractable is that the trackbacks are issued by software which could reasonably be expected to have direct access to your weblog's private keys. This could make signing totally automatic - simply check a box once, and your template could be updated and all future trackbacks would be automatically signed.
The signatures could be passed as a new CGI parameter or as a HTTP header. Neither would likely affect any existing software that wasn't expecting this information.
Once trackback signing is widely enough adopted, people may feel comfortable turning off the ability to accept unsigned trackbacks. And then much of the infrastructure will be in place to tackle the harder, and more important problem, of comment signing.
The key nut to crack there is to make it easy and painless to sign a comment.
For about three years now - I'm been hemming and hawing and giving people a hard time and (apparently) acting belligerent - about Open Identities.
About the notion of open DNS-like indices of people. And what we could do with them. You see I spent much of teh 90's desinging systems that relied uypon a theoretical notion - that noadasys is called social software and social networking. And at the core of that - is digital identity.
So as the world has caught up with my ideas, it's becoming more and more important that we DO IT RIGHT!
Now Tribe is calling that the PeopleWeb, Microsoft has a [can't talk about it but will soon] platform and Dick Hardt and his Sxip Networks is rolling out.
Along the way the Identity Commons has launched their i-Names effort and PingID continues to lead in the open source Liberty Alliance (and other enterprise protocols) space.
So Doc cautions us and says "we're barely srarted."
No shit - Sherlock.
But like I said - it's all happening. I just wish Dave Winer were part of the conversation - too.
Well as soon as you lock one door they came in the back. This morning I woke up to over 100 spam trackbacks that where very nasty. Some of you may have seen them in our trackback tracker on the main page. I really love to give credit to those sites that quote us but I cannot risk having them on the main page. They are getting smarter as they are spoofing IP's so it's not like I can put in a IP block. So those of you using Movable Type Version 3 the backdoor is wide open.
weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/06/13.html#a721
track this
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The worst part is he's close to right*...
kjartanmannes: so whats next for Mr Johnson?
fuzzygroup: in what context ?
kjartanmannes: well, you've been slashdotted so what is your new goal in life?
My sincere thanks to all the messages of encouragement, nice feedback and other comments.
Apparently not too many people realize that Technorati can be used to track references to individual posts. To demonstrate using here is track back-via-Technorati to my Ads in Feeds post. Beware that the link uses Technorati beta service for speed sake.
What I am not sure if Dave intended Technorati to be used this way.
I spent some time on the phone with the folks at GoDaddy today and they have a few ideas on what is going on with the server and are going to try a few things on the box we will keep our fingers crossed.
We will see what happens over the next few days.
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