You know, I have never had some many great meaningful discussions on so many relevant topics in all the years I have been in tech. I attribute alot of this to the buzzword of the latter part of this decade and that is the conversation. The emergence of the conversation between people wanting to work together, the collaboration of people working towards a collective goal. The customer finding his voice and the company finally listening with humility.
Mental Note: Be sure to write a piece about listening with humility. Who does that?
Which led me to think. What the hell did we do before? What did people do with all of this great input, insight, knowledge and wisdom before, but with no real vehicles to share it. Did they write books about conversations? Not really, Although, I know of one book where the conversations are rich and plentiful and thats the age of conversation edited by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan.
Tell me this isn’t a great time to be talking and sharing? I know these are hard times in some respects, but from a technology, innovation, and entrepreneuial standpoint, there has never been a more optimal time make a difference and actually do a lot with what we have right now! Here’s someone that all of you should follow. Ironically his blog is called How to change the world, once you get there if you have not heard of him, it won’t take you long to appreciate what he does with his time.
Another person that really enagages in some great discussions about, well conversations is Chris Brogan, your day should consist of stopping by Chris’s blog to see what he is thinking. In fact he has a post that I’m sure we all could relate to called, Be Sexier in Person. Not that Chris is blogging about sexy he is in person, just read the post.
You know who else I like, who else engages in light but interesting and thought provoking conversations? Mack Collier. he lays it out there in a way thats easy to digest. In actuality there are A LOT of conversations going on out there that I would like to take part in, but my god, would I ever get anything done?
I think whats important to keep in mind is that we all love to talk, or we wouldn’t be blogging but you tell me what do you want to get out of your next conversation? Are you into what you can contribute or what you can take away from it? What is your favorite blog and why?
Suffice it to say, I’m glad we’re in the age of the conversation and excited about where we are headed, wherever that may be.
Last thing. While I was writing this I had Pandora on in the backround and heard the most riveting acoustic version of “One”. The song originally sung by U2 was being sang by Warren Haynes at Bonnaroo, Check it out and tell me what you think.
Direct Marketing Observations 
Thanks for the kind words. I’m a big fan of people, and getting to know more about folks has been my bread and butter in the tech space for years. I’m just glad that people are sharing as much as they do with me. It helps. : )
Thanks for the kind words, Marc. The Age of Conversation (the time and the book) really are opening up opportunities for us all to reach out, engage and debate ideas that were previously closed conversations. Makes for interesting times, don’t you think?
we had conversations but not in such a widely distributed format. Think of the informality (or formality) of phone calls and meetings. While I find that meetings suck time because of the commute (unless everyone happens to be in the same location), the meetings were often energizing (or ennervating) depending on the topics and how the group dynamic functioned.
Phone calls were and are similar and it’s faster and more fun to catch up but the conversation points often could be forgotten unless you were actively taking notes which also meant that you were missing out on being present to the conversation.
so the conversation endures online in a different format and allows this post to keep on asking that question and getting responses — however the topic might have changed or you moved on to further evolutions of the topic.