De toekomst van Klessebes

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Ik zal hier de komende dagen wat iedeen achterlaten over wat we met klessebes zouden kunnen gaan doen. Belangrijker vind ik echter wat jullie zelf willen. Binnen enkel weken komt er een internet ongeving warin ieder denkbare technische oplossing in is verpakt, dus in technische zin is bijna alles mogelijk. Laat je fantasie de vrije loop zou ik zeggen... We doen ons best om alle ideeen te honeoreren, als het enigzins kan binnen 72 uur. Wonderen duren echter wat langer.

-- Ben (ben@timedesk.nl), March 31, 2001

Answers

Een deel van mijn inspiratie is afkomstig van een van de meest gevierde internet deskundigen... Dr. David Weinberger, schrijver van Small pieces en initator van Cluetrain Een manifest waarin duidelijkheid wordt geschapen over de consequenties van internet. Ben je geinteresseerd in meer inzicht van een kritisch Internet gebruiker, met een soms bizar gevoel voor humor, kijk dan eens op Joho Hierbij het laatste artikel dat Weinberger zojuits publiceerde...

"ALL HAIL THE LURKERS" By David Weinberger Editor, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization Lurking is the art of staying silent while conversation happens all around you. Off the Web, lurking is sinister. On the Net, lurking is the best way to enter a conversation.

The Net is throwing us not only into new conversations but into new ways of conversing. This makes life quadruple confusing. We're exposed not only to topics we would never have imagined -- some of which actually turn out to be worth our while -- but to new rhythms and expectations of conversation itself.

Email in general has its own unwritten rules. You can tell when someone's new to the form: the message is too long, too polite, too much like a memo. But each interchange of email also sets its own sub-expectations. How funny is it? How many typos are allowed? What's the permitted level of profanity? How far off topic can you go before it counts as a digression?

And the same is true of mailing lists and discussion groups, except even more so. Inevitably, such discussions quickly generate threads about the unwritten rules of the discussion. For example, last week we started up a discussion of The Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com) at www.topica.com. Almost instantly threads emerged taking people to task for being off topic, only to be told that the off-topic topics were in fact the most on-topic topics. And, a few contributors were chastised for quoting too much of the previous thread, heaven forfend! That, of course, generated discussion about the chastising, etc. This is all part of the coming to agreement about the discussion ethos.

Conversations, no matter what the medium, represent a tacitly negotiated sharing of contexts. Thus, to enter them one must first learn to listen. Otherwise, you run the risk of stomping in wearing big ol' waders and stepping on the feet of people engaged in an improvised tap dance.

This holds for the conversations going on among the employees in a company. The Net has provided the means by which people who don't know one another well can find themselves in conversations of every type. These conversations are the lifeblood of your organization. Thinking you can channel them -- nay, thinking you can even *enter* them -- without first learning to listen can be fatal.

Not to mention the conversations going on among your customers about you, your products, your people. You run the risk of sounding like a ham-fisted corporate a-hole if you don't learn to listen. It's hard to do because companies generally think that they're the authorities about their own products and thus get to speak in the voice used for regal proclamations. Learn to shut up for awhile until you can hear the murmur of the conversations around you. Then shut up some more while you lurk, listen and learn. Dit artikel is hier gepubliceerd.

Ik heb herhaalde malen met David Weinberger van gedachten gewisseld en hij is op de hoogte van mijn aktiviteiten als het gaat om internet toegankelijker te maken voor iedereen. Als we iets verder zijn met Klessebes zal ik hem zeker uitnodigen voor een cyber seminar op Klessebes.

-- Ben (ben@timedesk.nl), March 31, 2001.


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