Naked Conversations at Age 2

[Israel & Scoble with 1st Copy. Photo by Buzz Bruggeman]

We are just a few days short of Naked Conversations 2nd birthday, not from the date of publication, but from the date when Robert and I sent the final manuscript to our publisher for publication. It seems like yesterday to me. Simultaneously it feels like a million years ago.

So much has happened since then in terms of social  I won't event mention how the numbers we used in the book have dwarfed over two years ago. I think my favorite paragraph for irony is at te beginning of Chapter 14.

"Twenty years from now, people will look back at the blogging tools we use today and smile at how quaint they were. What will have replaced them?  We haven't a clue."

We went on to talk about the promise of RSS and something just starting up called podcasting,and we  speculated that something called "tagging" showed promise. Forget the 20 years.  We were pretty clueless about FaceBook and YouTube and online video and Twitter and so many things that have exploded on the internet in the past 24 months.

All ths came to mind this morning over on Facebook this morning when Scott Sykes, a PR practitioner for Weber Shandwick in China sent me a message asking me if I had any thoughts to share on changes since the book was published. I have quite a few, but here are a couple of to level thoughts:

• Naked Conversations was essentially about conversations replacing messages because of the internet.  We called that part a revolution and we still do. We talked almost exclusively about blogs because they were the only power tool of the conversational revolution at the time. What has changed is that there are now a great many tools and anyone can use any combination of them.  So the book is still correct on a philosophic view, but it's data has aged faster than Dorian Gray on steroids.
• Kids grow up. The younger generation is an online generation and it has started replacing my generation in the workplace.  Any company that is still not adapting to the social media revolution may discover it is too late to adapt and that some new company is going to disrupt their status quo by hijacking all its young customers.
• Two years from now, everything that is amazing now will be normal. Robert and I once again, don't have a clue as to what new and exciting and different tools will be introduced between now and then.

Comments

[jasbinder]

Happy Birthday (sure I won't be the only one saying that, or 'thank you'). Seminal book, still relevant after two years, which considering how fast things are moving says something. Also rather poignant given your co-author's recent thoughts on blogging in particular. Interesting that it feels right to celebrate a moment in (MSM) time, though I have yet to hear from someone celebrating, say, their blogging anniversary. That aside, I hope that what you find from the SAP survey will maybe help shed a little more light on the next 2-20 years.