"Why is that such a new thing?" my wife Lisa asks. She's busy working on her 'jewelry and bead' estore - called Stoneshine - and is wondering what the hell it is I do for a living. I try to tell her about all my ideas, the new things we're doing and how we're on the verge of a new thing - which I call 'multimedia conversations'.
"But haven't people been putting photos into blogs - for years?" she asks.
Well yes - but it's a hastle - I tell her. They gotta ftp up the photo, after cropping it in Photoshop, let alone the hastle of getting it out of the digital camera to begin with, and you gotta know all about <img tags, etc. Why can't Radio or Moveable Type or LiveJournal understand that humans don't want to jump through hoops.....
.......but that doesn't answer her claim that: "what's so new about people putting photos into blogs - and why does THAT make it a multimedia conversation?" Well to get at the 'what's so new' aspect, let's step back and look at where we are today... and then I've vamp on where we're going and 'multimedia conversations'. You might notice I'm putting that phrase in allot. It's new, and I kind of like it, and so I'm trying it out - to see how it fits.
Let's start with a typical blog shout out, here's Dave putting an idea 'to the wind' as he calls it:
Here's a feature request cast into the wind, not for anyone in particular. When I post a comment on weblog, as I do more often these days, I'd like to be notified when someone else posts to the same item, or perhaps the same weblog. It would automate something I do manually now. It would require a lot of cooperation to make such a feature work. [Scripting News]
And here's Doc replying to a specific question Dave put out:
I believe all four Cluetrain ringleaders will be there, too. Or at least nearby. Or something.
Whatever, it's gonna be an great show.
These are both good examples of traditional conversational interchange going on in the blogosphere.
But as Dave's idea points out - blog tools today need to treat comments as if they're special 'anchors', which ALSO get treated specially (like posts do now.) Comments and discussion group threads often get detached from the source post - and lose continuity. It would be nice to not only get notification when someone posts a comment replying to your comment, but also to enable discussion group threads to vote, tally surveys or interact in other 'new ways'.
Even when comments are grouped together, like in this interchange between me, Joi and Barak, then the original post is detached from the rest of the blog flow. Slashdot does a great job of facilitating threads and Plastic does a great job being a community aggregating tool. What if there was a new way of showing comments, threads and other interaction - that was PART of the blog flow? And what if these interactions were visually mapped into some new kind of tool for conversational interchanges? What would a new 'tool' like this look like to facilitate all this?
OK - now freeze here - now let's look at the multimedia side of the spectrum. Clearly creating or authoring multimedia is not a real-time process. It's something that's well thought out and methodically produced. This changes the nature of interchange, creativity and certainly conversation. Check out this chart. What happens when we explore the spectrum between publishing and communication?
What happens when images, audio and video become part of the interchange of conversation? How does publishing something change the nature of it - versus it simply being blurted out and 'communicated'? Is audio blogging about just reading the text of a post, or something more than that?
Now's let's imagine our faces - being part of our persistent net identity or profile - appearing inside of a blog interchange (or shall I say 'multimedia conversation'?). Or imagine thumbnails of videos representing views, people, opinions - which are then lined up across from, next to - beside of - other thumbnails - representing different points of views conflicting or interchanging with each other - or creating agreements - for that matter! How does conversation change - when you have multimedia to do it with?
Perhaps it's time we moved beyond 'thetimeline' - which is still the predominant metaphor for multimedia authoring. Perhaps encapsualting ideas, objects, posts, calendars or multimedia conversations - is where we're headed.
BTW Raymond Pirouz hits it on the head (in the attached comments to this post):
"What WOULD be revolutionary, is if there were a tool that could enable the "average" person to develop such a destination, though it would have to be easy to use...and that's the challenge toolmakers like Macromedia haven't been able to meet head-to-head.
It's one thing to create "developer" tools. It's another to create "user" tools. Raymond Pirouz [raymond@R35.com]
While I was busy looking at the Space Weather page to see if there was a chance of catching an aurora tonight (yes, they have been seen this far south, when there's a big solar wind), Mary Lu called and told me to get my ass outside to watch the rocket that just took off from Vandenberg.
It was already past Hawaii, I guess, by the time I got out where I could see the trail in the sky, to the West. But it was spectacular. The photo above doesn't do it justice, but does give a sense of how surreal it looked.
I just love it when Doc (or Dave, or Meg/Jason or Joi or anybody) puts images into their blog posts. It really starts to turn this medium into something new and different. I've been calling them multimedia conversations. How could you explain these images - with words? Same thing with audio blogs and SOON video blogs.
Here's the image Doc's pointing to. It's too cool not to include here:
There's an interesting thread going on at Slashdot about an Napster-like Universal Roaming Profile - which sounds like what the Libery Alliance WANTS their standard to be. And so we sit and wait. There's no way in hell anyone would trust Microsoft, but trust Sun? I'm not too sure about that.
NOTE: I tried really hard to find a brand logo for the Liberty Alliance - and this is the best I could find. But to get it - I had to do a screen grab of the Flash anim - as you CAN'T grab Flash and stick it into a post!
And what if these interactions were visually mapped into some new kind of tool for conversational interchanges? What would a new 'tool' like this look like to facilitate all this?
How does publishing something change the nature of it - versus it simply being blurted out and 'communicated'? Is audio blogging about just reading the text of a post, or something more than that? 
Or imagine thumbnails of videos representing views, people, opinions - which are then lined up across from, next to - beside of - other thumbnails - representing different points of views conflicting or interchanging with each other - or creating agreements - for that matter! 
How does conversation change - when you have multimedia to do it with?
