I've mentioned this fairly frequently, but The Cluetrain Manifesto said it first--markets are conversations.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

Or, in broader online terms--the web is a conversation. Sure, e-commerce makes things convenient and quick and available. But the 'energy' applications (those things that people contribute their energy to rather than demanding energy from) on the web are centered around interaction. Most of the most successful e-commerce operations (Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo) promote conversation and community.

At the ACE conference last week, I attended a session on characterizing an online audience. The presenters, who were from Oregon State, said that with the deployment of their new website, they began to get questions to the web master about any and all subjects--farming and dog training and wild animals in suburbia--that were covered somewhere on their website. Why? Why didn't people just go to the web pages and get the information?

Because people want conversation.

Or, as the presenters at the conference said, because they want contact. They want an interaction--to build relationships, to process information, to learn, and to build both their own capacity and the capacity of the organization they're interacting with.

Weblogs are generally conversational in tone, provide links to other experts, provide space for comments, and have some capacity for trackbacks (conversations and connections that spread across several web sites). Weblogs can update information quickly, respond to comments as they come, and even to lurkers, they can give the flavor of an ongoing, interested and enthusiastic conversation about things of interest to the people who visit. Weblogs, even group weblogs, can easily make it clear that there are real people with real ideas, opinions and conversational styles behind the large organizational website.