I don't think it is quite time to chuck back our glasses and drink up. Not yet. Soon, but not yet.

You and I in blogoland surely see the effects of markets being conversations everyday, but I hardly think that Marc Andreessen responding to an inquiry on Ning, seeing that a current Technorati vanity search on Ning brings up a manageable 552 posts. If startups aren't scanning the blogosphere for such opportunities, they've really dropped the ball.

Which, to me says, "Yes! That's right! Markets ARE conversations!"

Um...kinda.

You see, a post about, say...I dunno...Steven S Reinemund, CEO of PepsiCo asking him whatsup with the lime thing? I mean, wasn't lemon enough? Who the hell puts a lime in their cola? If he actually comments here, I'll drink more than my Koolaid, I'll drink Pepsi with lime...and not the diet one...

But that's only part of it. The blogosphere is accessible. Amazingly so. Conversations with bloggers come easy. But markets sprawl further than the blogosphere. If you are Technorati or Ning or FeedDemon, your business is to interact with the blogosphere.

But if you are Mattel, say, your business is to interact with children, who, are mostly absent from the blogosphere. How do you have a conversation with each and every child? It's a little daunting. So, seeing that children haven't been wired into the marketing engine like the rest of us, Mattel goes and buys up all of this saturday morning cartoon ad space and pays for prime retail location so that they can at least talk TO the kids. Feedback? Naw. That would be nearly impossible save a website with an email address. Conversation? You kidding? Think sending a bunch of suits to a playground is a good idea?

I want to believe it...I really do. I'm a Cluetrain cult member to the max. If only life were like that, I could breath easy, the internet could bring us closer together and world peace would be achieved. Sigh. But it isn't that ideal and believing it is will only break our hearts.

Between Dave Roger's perfectly sound arguments against catching the Cluetrain, the more recent frightening epiphanies from that Listenomics article in AdAge (that calls for *shudder* exploiting the conversation) and my own experience of the world (ahem...here), I am a little more cautious than Alex.

You see, one of the Cluetrain members himself didn't even respond to me pinging him loudly through the blogosphere a couple of weeks back, which says a great deal, 'cause even though I'm #25,960 on Technorati, conversations are supposed to happen at the most micro-level according to The Cluetrain (and, besides, that puts me in the top 1% of nearly 20 million blogs).

So, therefore, I don't think we should get too excited yet about markets being conversations quite yet.

Tags: cluetrain, marketing

(oh...bonus...check out Jeneane Sessum's hilarious revisit of the Cluetrain here: Markets are conversations. No they're not. Yes they are. No they're not. Yes they are. Nuh-uh...)