The Art of Conversation is live!

[jducoeur]

After talking about it for several weeks, I've finally gone and created the new blog: The Art of Conversation. The first post there describes in some detail what it's going to be about, so I won't echo it all here -- suffice it to say, the official focus is Purposeful Online Conversation in Communities.

I know that a bunch of folks here are interested in the subject, so I'll gently push you all over to it: please come, read, comment, and generally join in -- it'll be a lot more fun if I have some friends along for the ride. I've syndicated it in LJ as artofconv (hopefully LJ will eventually update that); the feed is http://artofconv.wordpress.com/feed if you want to follow it in some other blog reader.

Please don't be shy if you'd like to post something there. While I'll be the principal author, and will be trying to keep it professional and on-topic, I actually think it will be a lot more fun if other people are offering their insights as well. The blog is going to be *about* conversation, but I'd like it to also *be* a conversation itself, among people who are interested in the topic.

So please join in, and tell anyone who you think would be interested in it...

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Lemme get started on "a layman's guide to conversation analysis". Sure to piss off the twelve worldwide practitioners of this arcane discipline. ;)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Listing topics here as a sort of a 'to-do' list:

* What is CA? (and Discourse Analysis)
* What CA can teach you about understanding an interaction.
* Overview of how a medium's features can impact the shape of conversation and of its surrounding community. (This could spawn a number of sub-articles, each about a particular medium.)
* The public nature of public conversations: owned by all participants in one sense, owned by the person that can delete them in another. (The recent Xeni/Violet Blue foofaraw is a great example of 'soft' ownership conflict.)
* How conversations mediate commitments; examples from 'hunh' moments in email or lj conversations.

...that's probably too many already.

[jducoeur]

...that's probably too many already.

Actually, it sounds like a series of articles, rather than a single one. That's fine with me: the right thing to do is probably create a category in the blog for CA (WordPress encourages using formal categories for posts), and then spread the articles out at something like one a week while they continue to occur to you. I think it would be a great counterpoint to my more informal approach to the subject...

[jducoeur]

Heh -- sounds great!

Actually, could you create yourself a wordpress.com login, and send me the email address you use for that? Since you have more to say on the subject than most people, I figure I might as well just formally add you as one of the authors of the blog, and that way you'll have full access to the tools...

[laurion]

Looks good so far. Does wp.com let you setup OpenID logins? A fairly popular option for a lot of the hand-rolled WP installs I know.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Not apparently -- at least I'm not seeing an option for it anywhere in the blog settings.

This is sadly common among large sites: they're all OpenID providers, but not consumers. Although in this particular case I'm a bit surprised: since they don't require you to create a WordPress account in order to comment, there's no obvious reason not to accept them. But there appears to be a thread of people pushing for them to adopt it.