Not-So-Naked Conversations

A short, but interesting reflection on the changing nature of conversations - naked and not-so-naked. The key point:

The bottom line is that technology ushers in new forms of social organization that escape notice precisely because they are invisible to adherents of the old paradigm.

DE-commerce, XXX-commerce

One of the nuggets that I gathered from reading the book Naked Conversations is that there are relatively few bloggers in Germany. So I was particularly pleased to find that one of these rare DE-bloggers had alighted, however transiently, on these very pages, and carried, magpie-like, a gewgaw back to its teutonic eyrie.

The site in question is called Exciting Commerce, with the slightly pleonastic subheading "The Exciting Future of E-commerce". It has a good, clean design (one that coincidentally seems to use the same link colour as the HorsePigCow site I mentioned yesterday).

The content is good, too, not least because it covers precisely the subject that I lament is so hard to observe: the marriage of Web 2.0 and e-commerce. The site begs to differ from me, though, suggesting that there is, in fact, plenty of this stuff around.

Whichever camp you fall into, it's a useful blog for keeping tabs on some of the latest e-commerce efforts from around the world (and not just in the US), even if you don't read German, since many of the quotations are in English, and you can always just click on the links to see where they take you.

My only problem is the site's preference for the umbrella term "social commerce" over e-commerce 2.0: for me, the former sounds perilously close to a Victorian euphemism.

Synchronicity

I'm currently reading Naked Conversations (sub-title: "how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers"). It's full of well-told anecdotes and some interesting ideas, although I'm not convinced yet that it will add up to more than a "corporate blogging is cool" kind of message.

That notwithstanding, I was slightly taken aback to find myself living out one of the ideas from the book. This came from the inimitable Dave Winer, who said, speaking of journalists:

They don't want the light shone on themselves, which is ironic because journalists are experts at shining the light on others.... This is why we have blogs. We have blogs because we can't trust these guys.

Speaking as a journalist, can I just say "Thanks, Dave," for that vote of confidence.

But the idea that bloggers can watch the journalists watching them is all-too true, as I found when I went to Paul Jones' blog, and found this posting, in which he not only tells the entire world what I'm up to (no great secret, to be sure), but also effectively says that he will be publishing his side of the story when my article comes out so that readers can check up on whether I've done a good job.

The only consolation is that at least I can leave a comment on his posting on my article about him....