Our individual voices are creating networks of meaning. Through our passions and our participation in conversations online, we are creating value for ourselves and others.

Interesting that it is human interactions and the visibility of these that create value for communities. And even more interesting, that it is these visible conversations that have that critical "pull" factor that pulls audiences, authenticates opinions and builds or destroys reputations for companies or individuals.

It seems to be that the people who are passionate, really passionate about certain areas of interest, and who are pointing these areas out to others in the visible spaces that connect, are the ones who are determining where opinions flow. Or at least creating catalysts for certain discussions to happen. These people are also the ones to become the most likely well connected and influential. An interesting dynamic!

And the spaces where these conversations are happening - these connecting spaces, the interstices between us, are not only collecting our opinions, saving them and displaying them online for the whole world to view, they are also enabling, empowering and strengthening our ties to each other. We are, in aggregate, creating meaning.

It is these connecting spaces that are giving our collective perceptions voice.

I wanted to ask Ross Dawson, futurist, author, keynote speaker, and Chairman of international consulting firm Future Exploration Network about these connecting spaces and about how our voices are playing out online. Ross kindly agreed to be interviewed and gave me some very insightful perspectives into our collective behaviours, our connections, the long tail etc, which I think you will also find interesting.

Here is the interview:

MO: First I’d like to say thank you very much.

My particular interest for interviewing you today is to write up on something which I will entitle "connecting spaces"- something that you know much more about than I do myself and I am therefore very interested in hearing your thoughts on how people are connecting online and especially hearing your thoughts on future trends which pertain to the network that is growing, and how it might play out.

And so, if I can ask you to please, first of all tell me about yourself, and also your particular interest in the internet and its trends.

RD: Well, as I’ve just mentioned, I’ve had a very diverse background, have lived in many countries, learnt a number of languages along the way and worked in many industries. It’s interesting - when I trace back, I’ve always had a very "network" perspective on the world. I can remember when I was a child, I was given a little microscope kit with a worm in the kit, and I wanted to dissect its brain to see how its neurons were connected. And back in the days before the internet, I envisaged the telephone connections around the planet as this extraordinary network which connected us and which did and does, though at the time the cost of connection was so high.

We humans are social animals; as such the internet is an extraordinary enabler of communication and is enabling many aspects to humanity which we haven’t yet explored.

MO: Indeed, which we haven’t yet explored. And so connections and people and how they can connect, is something that has very much been part of your whole interest along the way. It’s been a theme, I can hear.

RD: Yes, absolutely.

MO: Your present interests, where do they reside?

RD: Very diverse. I’m interested in networks, which are a very critical perspective for me. There are a number of different perspectives to the networks. One is the technological networks which underpin connectivity. Another is the social networks between people. Another is the networks between organisations: economic networks. Yet another is the whole network of ideas which we are seeing flow, now are enabled by the Web 2.0 technologies. Tthere is also a very strong parallel between all of these and the networks of our brains.

I am deeply interested in social networks. Social network analysis is something I spend a lot of time on. Web 2.0 is a phrase that some people like and some people don’t like, but what I find extraordinary about the current phase of the internet is that it is an enabler of connectivity and participation that is truly transformative. That’s what I am looking at and spending time on. How the relationships enabled by the new internet technologies are giving value to all of us.

MO: And I can see that there are parallels certainly, that that would allow for a great deal of in depth analysis, which we don’t have time for here, so if I could go straight in and ask you, about the connecting spaces, if you can tell me about these. You referred to these in your keynote speech in Sydney for Hothouse, as, what was the word you used?

RD: Interstices. The interstices. What is interstitial is what is between. Our media is now more and more relevant in more and more domains.

Media encompasses not just our traditional newspapers and television and so on. Media is the plural of medium. It is the channels whereby we get information. There has been an enormous shift in those channels, from primarily one-to-many and broadcasts, to now the often predominant mode of media being many-to-many. It is between other individuals.

It is very much a relationship basis, a network basis-who we are as individuals as positioned within our social network and the people we know and the people we communicate with. And so this idea of the interstitial is positioning between these relationships.

I think this is a very relevant way of thinking about Myspace for example. It was bought by one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. That was because they had seen that there was a whole new generation of people who were not favouring one-to-many broadcast media, and were spending their time and their attention in these many-to-many peer relationships.

What Myspace does is enable News Corporation to position itself at the interstices, between these relationships, at the places between where people communicate, between themselves.

So now these social networking platforms have enabled people to communicate and to connect and find peers and people with similar interests. This also has allowed - amongst others - media companies to reposition themselves, to play between these relationships and to add messages or to communicate other things that are of interest or value. Not being in this very passive mode where people are simply consuming media.

MO: You know, you mentioned two things there that I can pick up on, and that is, that it is between people, and people who are similar I suppose. I get from that, that it’s between peers, and therefore I would imagine there would be some kind of a shared repertoire, at least some kind of a common ground would be necessary. That makes me think, and it’s something that I’d like to explore perhaps at a later point.

But you also mentioned the companies, and how they are placing themselves, positioning themselves strategically in these connecting spaces. And they are perhaps also monitoring the spaces, monitoring our conversations?

You mentioned this monitoring of the web in your speech in Sydney, and how companies keep track of our conversations, especially the lead consumers. So I would like to ask you who are the lead consumers and why are companies monitoring them?

RD: The idea of the innovation curve is that there are leaders who are the first ones to take up a new technology or way of working or thinking, and then you get the followers and finally you get the bulk of people to take on the innovation. So it’s very important for any organisation, be they commercial or government, to understand where the lead people are, the people who are first experimenting with and exploring and taking on new technologies, because they are the vanguard. It doesn’t mean that everything they do is necessarily what everyone else will do in the future, but these are the people who are the most influential.

The original ideas were proposed in the classic book Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. It explores the idea of how innovation, new ways of doing things, or new concepts diffuse through society. This is based on particular people, their behaviours and the way they communicate to others about what they are doing.

So in any successful innovation being taken up, there are always leaders who perceive it, see the value, proselytise and tell other people that there is value there. Thus it is critical, not just to access these lead consumers, but also to understand what they are engaged with. They are not just signalling where things are going, they are also highly influential.

These kinds of people are not ones you can readily influence yourself. Their independence of mind is part of what characterises them, yet if you’ve got something that is worthwhile, then these are the people who you can expect will take up new ideas.

MO: Yes, it is a very interesting thought, that there is perhaps almost a kind of cognoscenti out there. I don’t know if you would choose to use that word? But that there are leading conversations going on and that there are perhaps only a select few, again, I don’t know if you’d say there were a select few who are leading these, but certainly I think it’s possibly the same people. Would you say that there are certain select people who are leading these and can one pinpoint them?

RD: Certainly, that is one of the insights that have come from social networks. Social network theory is being able to see, in terms of the social structure, how innovations get taken up. There has been some research recently by Duncan Watts which argues that this isn’t dependent on particular individuals, yet still, those people who are the first to explore and take up new innovations, are necessarily the ones that lead the way and start to influence others.

So there is a, I wouldn’t use the word cognoscenti as such, because they are not necessarily the ones who know the most, but they are the ones who are trying things out and exploring, and have the influence to spread the word effectively.

MO: And the conversations that are taking place would you say that these are mostly about commodities or ideas?

RD: That is one of the key characteristics of this new interactivity: conversations- the fact that now that we are connected, these conversations are enabled, these conversations can be viewed publicly, you know the blogs and the way in which people can make points on blogs, reflect on whether you know somebody, or whether you don’t. It becomes a very broad space in which conversations in which people are agreeing, making new points or building on them, start to happen in a far broader and public forum. That’s one of the real powers of the connected world in which we now live.

MO: And the conversations themselves, would you say that they emerge from talking about products, commodities or do they also diverge into quite ideological space?

RD: The nature of the people that are engaged in these conversations is that they are very diverse. There are many different communities with different types of conversations happening. But in the main, these are people who are writing about what they are passionate about. You know for example that there is a whole segment of society that is very excited about new technologies, and so they tend to write about gadgets and devices which are just coming out.

The key point in common across these different groups where conversations emerge, is that they are passionate.

They spend their time to express their opinions and see what other people are reading and saying, and responding to them. This could be in politics or technology or the environment or other domains. These tools provide an opportunity for people to express their passions.

MO: If I can ask you a bit about news sites for a moment, both the social news sites and the mainstream ones, and they both have a gigantic community of bloggers (or people who are writing in commenting on the blogs of these sites.) Would you go as far as to say that there are anchor bloggers or people who are key bloggers, who are directing opinions, particularly within the news sites, the social media news sites, and the mainstream ones?

RD: I think there is a distinction to made here. One space is the blogs. And the other is the social media sites, social news sites or social book marking sites such as digg and techmeme and so on. There are different characteristics to those two domains. In the blogs, the structure of the blogs means that there is a real focus of attention on a relatively small domain.

One of the issues is that of the long tail. People often misunderstand the long tail. To understand the long tail you must know that there are different types of networks, and there is a particular type of network which is called scale free, which essentially means that it has the same structure whether it is small or its large.

Both the internet and things like the community of blogs are both scale free in the sense that they have the same structure whether they are small or large or very large. The distribution of the number of connections in a scale free network follows a power law curve. This means that there are always some who are very highly connected, have many network connections, and there are many who do not have many network connections.

You can demonstrate empirically that the number of connections of blogs follows this particular distribution. This is supported by the structure of visibility, where those that are visible, those that "have", tend to get more. Bloggers who are visible tend to become more visible, and those that are not visible don’t tend to get more visible.

There are many mechanisms that support the structure of the long tail. This means that, just as there is strong centralisation of influence in the broadcast media world, there are now a small number of bloggers who are highly visible and influential. This happens because people look to the lead bloggers, continually reference them and accentuate their visibility.

The social news sites are not about people writing. They are about people submitting and voting on what they see as relevant. So what we tend to see is that there are relatively few people who are both scouring for and submitting these newsworthy articles. These tend to be the ones that gain the most visibility.

MO: Yes, that’s very interesting what you have just told me, that it is in fact the people who are submitting, not necessarily the ones who are writing, and so, an opinion isn’t necessarily needed to become visible, but that one can find something interesting and put it out there. Am I right in thinking that?

RD: That’s right, there is this new role, which is being recognised and even beginning to be rewarded, which is those people who discover and put forward those things that are interesting.

MO: But would I also be right in thinking that the people who are respected within the blogosphere, who in fact do write but topics, who are becoming more visible, and you seem to suggest that this visibility sort of perpetuates itself - the more visible one becomes, the more visible again one becomes. That this perpetuated visibility lets one work one’s way up towards the pinnacle of the long tail, by networking.

RD: Yes, as I said this structure of the long tail will be maintained, some with many links and many with few links.

MO: And about the conversations that are happening online, could you tell me perhaps a little bit about the ways in which one can capitalise on them, if in fact one can? Do you think there are ways that will perhaps emerge, maybe that aren’t prevalent at the moment but ways that will become evident. That here is a market? If one is a person who links and interacts with the right people and has conversations with the people who are the opinion leaders or the people who submitting. And by linking to them, networking with them, that somehow one can capitalise on that?

RD: Certainly there are many people who are trying to get value from this emerging domain, and some who are. As a broad generalisation, those who are doing the best are the ones who are engaging on the terms of this new emerging social media space, in terms of being passionate, engaging in conversations, agreeing, disagreeing, building, creating value for the community. I think that creating value for the community is what is most likely to create value for the participant.

There are many commercial enterprises that are trying to create blogs, that are trying to create positive impressions or spamming comments or trying to get links to their product sites and so on, but none of this is really having a positive impact. Sometimes it has a very negative impact. Those that are most successful are the ones that are really participating with the intent of creating value for the community, as well as themselves.

MO: And may I ask you. What do you see emerging on the web in a very broad sense?

RD: Well many things. A few things to point to. One is the extension of what people were describing when Web 2.0 emerged. Broad group participation leads to emergent collective outcomes - many people participate and unexpected things are created out of that which are of value to the community. We can find more easily what we want. There are more interesting things created. This is just the beginning of that whole domain. A key mechanism is that people are exposing more and more of their behaviours. Del.icio.us is a good example, where people can see what what other people find interesting. People are able to see what is relevant to themselves and to other people with similar profiles. So group participation that creates collective results is going to go a lot further.

One of the other key domains is around identity. We are just beginning to see some of this whole issue of being able to define and expose our identity in appropriate ways. This is a critical foundation for everything else. When we see a comment on eBay about other people, you want to know who made that comment. What is their motivation behind the comment? Can you trust that source? This goes into a far broader domain, which is reputation.

Something that I think will emerge over the next decade or so, is reputation as a key foundation to the internet. We have already seen that in, for example, how the authoritativeness of bloggers is assessed by how many and which people deem thier work valuable. We are going to see more and more a collection, an aggregation of people’s perceptions to assess people’s reputation in a particular context. Whether or not to trust them or to place faith in them.

MO: Ross, would you tell me where you would like see things going. In what direction would you like to see change happening?

RD: I think there are things which are very positive. I’ve been blogging for getting on to 5 years now and I’ve always believed strongly in the whole idea of blogs and collaborative filtering and so on, but it has actually progressed far faster than I thought. I have been surprised by how mainstream blogging and associated technologies have become in a relatively short space of time. I think the example of del.icio.us I mentioned before is a fantastic one. Not long ago people put their favourite bookmarks on their PC. Only they would see it.

Now we are very rapidly shifting to a world where a large proportion of people are making their bookmarks available to everybody. This sharing is creating an entirely new space which is immensely valuable. This collective value is very rapidly unfolding. It is extraordinary that it all seems to be happening now.