Who owns conversations? And what are the rules?
Before you get too far into this, I've also published this post to Google Wave at this link if you'd like to read along there instead.
Using Google Wave heavily over the past several weeks has really gotten my mental gears cranking, pondering all of the changes coming down the pike in the next year or so.
One of the things that I'm really trying to wrap my head around is how a medium like a wave changes the dynamic of the interaction between the publisher of a post and the observers and other participants. In a wave it's possible for anyone to edit the original text or insert comments directly inline--this is a pretty big departure from the way most messaging platforms work. For example in this blog post you can't edit what I've already written, and you can't insert your comments directly in the middle, but you can leave comments at the bottom. In a wave you don't have those restrictions.
While I've always subscribed to the idea that a blog is a conversation with its readers, waves elevate readers to participants on equal footing with the original poster. It really creates an ad hoc social network around the post. This turns the original post from an "article" or "post" into something else that evolves and changes over time as the participants edit and add to it. And then of course they're free to add their own individual comments outside the scope of the original post, leaving the original post intact.
I love the idea of being able to elevate some readers to participants so that the original content can evolve and the idea contained in it can develop over time--it's very much like a wiki, but with more structure. But I don't know that the current wide-open model where anyone in the world can come along and edit the content is the right way to do this.
It seems that you almost have two classes of users now, active participants (editing the original content) and participating observers who add their comments in separate messages such as responses and comments. I wonder if this is something that will eventually need to be built into the platform, the ability to elevate certain groups of people to direct participants while still letting others comment and reply in non-obtrusive ways.
The fact that other people can directly edit the content also calls into question who actually owns the content. When I post something to my blog, like this post, it effectively belongs to me. But when I post this same content to a wave others can change it, and then I'd argue that it doesn't really belong to me as much.
It almost makes sense that certain groups of participants who are collaborating on an idea would have their own identity, and their own "blog" at that point. I don't know where the line is that a wave would belong to a group of people rather than the person who started it, but I do know that I've seen several waves that have crossed that line already.
I'm very interested to see this dynamic develop over time. In the interest of watching that happen I'm publishing this both to my blog and Google Wave, and I'm very interested in seeing the difference in the way the two evolve over time.
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