by Jim Cashel
August 2003
Dan Gillmor is a technology
columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, an inveterate blogger,
and a long-time proponent of the potential of online communities (he even asks
for community help in writing his current book). We asked his current
views on trends to watch regarding online collaboration.
What do you feel are the most important trends today relating to online group interaction?
In no particular order:
1) IM. I now rely on it, and find myself in occasional chats that are both fun and enlightening. For some
teenagers it's almost replacing e-mail and the phone. (Soon enough it will replace the phone when we marry
IM and VOIP...) Watching kids who carry on multiple conversations simultaneously is a real learning
experience. They get this in ways older folks cannot.
2) Multiplayer games also fascinate me, especially the ones that force you into serious, almost moral
decisions about cooperation versus competition (and where they intersect). Again, I may be too old to
understand it, but I'm trying.
3) Open source. Virtual barn-raisings are changing the way we look at software, but the model has wider
implications. Journalism itself is changing as the former audience gets active in the process, for
example.
4) Wikis. These and other kinds of things are now being called "social software," a term that begins to
capture the potential.
Most of the interesting work in online communities resides with small organizations. Which big companies do you see that
are using community in innovative ways?
Few if any. I think Sun is trying with Java.net, but it needs work. One of the most successful, when I
think about it, is Microsoft with its Usenet support newsgroups where it has gotten customers to do tech
support. Amazing...
What we need to see is a big company really open itself to what the Cluetrain guys were talking about:
the market as a conversation. I just don't see it happening yet, but it will.
Nearly all online communities today rely principally on text. How do you envision multimedia capabilities moving into online
community applications?
I don't have any good answers. The bandwidth problem is severe and will stay that way when we move beyond
one-to-one or one-to-many communications. And text works especially well in an asynchronous mode (e.g.
threaded conversations). Yet the value of seeing someone or hearing a voice is enormous.
You started blogging years ago, and maintain one of the most important blogs online. What do you say to skeptics who believe
blogs to be innovative but of only passing importance?
Blogs will evolve. As millions come online, we'll need better tools (RSS aggregators, for example) to follow
the conversations. But what they set off was absolutely essential: a move toward a Web that we
could all write on, not just read -- a move back to what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned in the first place.
The importance of that is impossible to overstate.
Blogs will also help democratize journalism, a subject I care about more than most. We need to listen to the
people at the edges, not just ourselves and our usual-suspect list of sources. We can learn a lot, and
so can anyone who wants to be more informed.
The questions of what to believe and how to deal with unverified information remain. But people are getting
pretty savvy about this, I think (or at least hope).
If one wants to get a sense of the potential of online communities in five
years, where should one look today?
I'd watch the gamers and the military, because they're technologically ahead and seem to have the money to
buy the latest and greatest gear. But I'd also look for people who consider themselves outsiders in some
way. The desire to find people who understand where you're coming from -- especially when you're being
frowned on by larger society -- leads to great innovation in virtual communities. Example: The
radical Right used the BBS in the early 80s, totally out of the radar of mainstream America.
Dan can be reached at dgillmor@mercurynews.com
