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readwriteweb, Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / April 15, 2009

Ten years ago the ClueTrain manifesto said that "markets are conversations" but today a more pertinent statement could be that conversations are becoming markets - or that there's a market for monitoring conversations. A whole class of technologies are emerging to help companies keep track of the conversations exploding online.

The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future?

To be sure some of the future will be frighteningly intrusive and creepy; we've argued that the present state of the art in social media monitoring already is. As lovers of technology, though, we're also excited to see what companies like this enable in the future. If web 2.0 was all about democratizing publishing, then the next stage of the web may well be based on democratizing data mining of all that content that's getting published.

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