It is interesting how ideas tend to join up. Old ideas and new ideas start to converge, get finished, when the culture is ready for them, but not before. It looks like the time of the conversation economy has finally come, and I'm very glad of it.

The key point here for me is that due to the culture of Blog, MySpace, YouTube and User Generated Content, communications are now two way, from consumer to consumer. The marketer is strangely incidental, can plant a message perhaps, but success will emerge from conversations, relationships, affinities, rather than the message directly.

success will emerge from conversations

I'd like to add another conversational agent, implied by the above. The website. My take on this has always been than an interaction with a website has to be seen as a conversation where the rules of the conversational exchange are required to be upheld - the content needs to be relevant, be of the right quality, be of the right quantity and clear. This list in fact developed by Paul Grice, a philosopher of language, as his conversational maxims. If these rules are broken, a poor customer experience results with the usual consequences. (My university thesis was about Grice and Interface Design in 1992.)

The third part of this unholy trinity is Brian Eno. I've been recently reading his 1994 diary in which he says, and I apologise for the lenth of quote but it is worth his explanation rather than my gloss:

The word is out and the word is wrong. 'Interactive' is the wrong word....I think it can be summed up in a better word: 'unfinished'. The idea is very clear: here is an object of culture whcih you must finishe before you can use it. Another way of saying that is to suggest that culture-makers are moving away from providing pure, complete experiences to providing the platforms from which people then fashion their own experiences...we are unfinished (and unfinishable) beings whose task is constantly to re-examine and remix our ideas and identities.

Three ideas converge, it is their time:

• The conversation economy, the medium is the message (2007)
• The conversational maxims, web interactions are conversations (1992)
• Web culture as unfinished exploration of identity and ideas (1994)

And so, to finish, what are your thoughts?