Public conversations make the world smarter.

Blogs are one-to-many communication. My words, flung to the Internet. Scoured by search engines. Subscribed to or stumbled upon.

Skype conversations are mulitparty. It's the difference between a standup comic with a microphone and an improv troupe. Between an a capella soloist and a choir. Between a soliloquy and a play.

There is a conversation among bloggers, if you can call it that. Threads very loosely joined. I see something in someone else's blog and post a reply in mine. Mostly, though, blogs are monologous. Monoblogs, if you will. Masterblogtion, to be unkind. Conversations, like sex, are so much better when you're not alone. They have the gusto of interpersonal psychology. Dramatic structure. Clarification of thought. Action and reaction.

When we treat multiparty conversations as blogfodder, is it useful? Often. We see this, to a degree, in some of Bill Campbell's interviews. All parties consent, one party cleans up a conversation and publishes it. Then Skype Journal's readers become privy to heretofore private conversation. And they can capitalize on Bill's access and effort. Later, strangers will find it via Google, other bloggers will link to it (it now has a permalink), and that little talk is now history.

Does making private conversations public (some might call it publication) serve a public good? Build the creative commons? Yes, to the degree the conversation itself warrants it. The same logic that applies to blogging and podcasting applies here.

Some tools, like Pamela, make it easier to archive my conversations on servers by blogging the text chats and podcasting the audio ones. Few of my conversations are Google-worthy, let alone blogworthy, but some will be important for private family blogs and other conversations will be handy in private project and team blogs.

So the tools and personal incentives are coming together to make conversation sharing cheap, easy, fun, and rewarding.

Skype and others of its species approach a threshold moment, a tipping point, where their users may contribute more content to the searchable Internet than does the blogosphere.

For every voice chat I have, I have 10 text chats, so it won't take many Skypers publishing conversations to become a significant factor in search results.

As millions of conversations leave digital footprints, joining our collective memory organ, and as we choose to publish some of them the way we do blog posts, we'll see a new connective tissue emerge. A Technorati of dialog. A Google of conversations. So I can discover other people talking about the same local issues that I am. So I can join ongoing conference calls the way some people join a listserv thread.

And as our conversations enter the commons, we will be that much smarter, that much more connected, that much better informed about our world, our communities, and ourselves.