Noted author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and the upcoming book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Dave Weinberger kicked things off this morning at WOMBAT in New Orleans.

Dave started off his keynote with a question, "Yes we know that markets are conversations, but is marketing a conversation?" Our first duty is to the conversation. But what happens to marketing with the top priority is conversation?

For many years we lived in the world of broadcast, i.e. a select few talking to everybody else. We get to listen, we receive the radio waves. We want to lean forward and not lean back. Things are changing.

There has been an evolution of the market. It started as a place to do business, the traditional market. Now the term is a verb, it means to sell to somebody. This was driven by the industrial revolution. Customers became consumers, things that can be replaced. Conversation became messages.

Dave quotes Doc Searls, "There's no market for messages." Marketing becomes a war.

Instead of relying upon corporations for information, people rely upon each other.

What are marketing conversations really like? Dave referenced the Juicy Fruit blog campaign. The blog was designed by people that probably had seen a blog, but never really interacted with blogs. The bloggers thought they were being passionate consumers, but they were just being lame.

Dave recently shopped for a washer and dryer. Rather than visiting the Kenmore site he searched blogs. He trusts the information he receives from other people. Often there is information about products/services that you can only get from other customers.

It's not the value of conversation, it's the value in conversation. People talk in real voices and have conversations that are opened ended. Conversation is about WE are interested in.

Control by the market is increasing. There is more person to person communication than broadcast communication. However it's not about the tools and the content of this new market. It's the connections.

For years there was a separation between content and meta-data in the analog world. Today, with everything digital, all content and meta-data are digital.

The owners of the information no longer own the organization of that content, the users do. You can no longer know what people are interested in. People will determine that on their own. The lesson, include everything.

Tagging and folksonomies have given users control over the organization of content.

The result is that content becomes more valuable when it's free. Think about the travel industry. For an airline their flight information is more valuable when they share it with other sites. Users don't want to search every airline site.

Things like playlists are bringing order to the chaos that is all the music in the world.

Hyperlinks are not neutral. A link is a little act of generosity. You're telling people to go somewhere else. Links are like conversation, you recognize that somebody else's view is important.

The majority of company web pages are not designed to be conversational since they own it. They think they know what we want and how we want it.

Dave turned the conversation to Edelman and their recent issues. Dave noted that he is a consultant to Edelman. While Edelman is genuinely trying to do things right they have screwed up. The truth though, is that this is hard to do. Companies are going to fail before they succeed.

Why is this new conversational market so hard to deal with? Clients want to sell, and customers are still sitting ducks. Advertising does work, we as humans respond to good advertising. The combination of self-interest and human meaning leads to self-delusion.

One of the major issues is that marketers get paid to talk. Does that corrode the conversation?