Online conversations....

Technology has moved the online conversation - a long way.

The new conversation is being convened in what I refer to as "Chattering Clusters" not online communities. It turns out that online communities are very hard to form and farm as a social entities.

This is why sustained innovation is so difficult in the flat world of the internet. For example, Google innovates the search engine and matches it with a revenue model supported by targeted online advertising. We all expected Google to continue to grow and grow over the next 10 years. But hold the new Google phone! Suddenly in 2008 the online market has moved to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. This is not the natural stomping grounds for iGoogle, Googlers, and the Googleplex.

The Chattering Clusters are formed by people who struggled to hold conversations on the net in the old online formats of blogs, chat room, web seminars, etc. So as soon as they could they moved to a new platform. Chattering Clusters may prove to be perfect pointers to what makes Web 3.0 so very different to Web 2.0. These are fledgling developments in commercial terms but not in social terms.