One of the biggest benefits of a conference is meeting new people with surprising ideas, and on the last day of Kosmopolis in Barcelona I grabbed a couple of those marvelous opportunities. I had a brief talk, followed up by email, with the founder of Dispatx, a site dedicated to collaborative art production and to exploring the processes behind collaborative art. I also struck up a conversation with an author who gave me a whole different perspective on the subject matter I was talking about at the conference: the influence of interactive web technologies on journalism.

Dispatx is a large project that has been going on for two years and has lined up dozens of artists and writers in many languages. The site solicits projects through very open-ended criteria that encourage thinking about process, and about the role of the artwork among the community of viewers. (Look at the list on the right side of the web page for some of the project themes.)

Dispatx provides a forum for on-going discussion and development on artworks. Currently, it is mostly one-way, but a blog with commenting capabilities allows viewers to influence development.

Oliver Luker, who founded and runs Dispatx in Barcelona, has described his vision of web collaboration so impressively I’m just going to cite him here:

What we have seen is that the proximity of the projects being worked on over a period of time, always within the conceptual framework of the theme, creates an atmosphere of mutual influence and collaboration–one might even say community.

This can be seen in the way projects that are being developed at the same time tend to bleed into one another, an organic development we have bolstered and reinforced by weekly detailed reviews of all the projects that have posted that week. This process works to direct a coherent response to a given theme taken as a whole.

If we understand the nature of Web 2.0 as a surface-level phenomenon with no directed activity and a surfeit of facile intercommunications, epiphenomenal on content but with no true relation to it, then we must hold up our hands. Although tagging and threaded comments have been introduced, the demanding nature of “art,” amongst other things, fosters little more than abstract thought. If, on the other hand, we understand the nature of a socialized internet as being a tool for directed activity, the debate must of necessity shift to a discussion of those ends.

I interpret this far-ranging prose to mean that artists want more than clever ways to embed one completed piece of work in another, which is what Web 2.0 usually involves now. Artists want to link their feelings and thoughts in ways that will be deeply reflected in their work, and the Web can make that possible. Dispatx is experimenting with the tools to make it happen. Mash-ups are reuse; Disptax is collaboration.

I reported in my previous blog that journalists and authors were using the Internet to find out what readers were interested in and to garner improvements from readers. One of the authors who seems to be making an impressive success of these strategies is Georgina Rôo, whose Spanish-language blog I am beginning to understand (empiezoaentender.blogspot.com) attracts, by her guess, several thousand readers. One can easily see fifty, sixty, eighty comments on some of her short pieces, which describe impressions of life in Argentina, France, and Barcelona.

What does Blogger’s simple interactive setup offer Rôo? Nothing less than a chance for her readers to shape her work. Their comments give instant feedback on what moves them, what matches their own realities, and what more they want to hear.

One of the most interesting incidents came when she happened to post an old photograph of Argentinian hippies from the 1960s. She was tired that day, and posted it essentially undocumented with just a short explanation. The readers let her know that they were by no means satisfied; they practically demanded she express herself further. And so she wrote a vignette story to accompany the photo. Her short story would never have come to light without the urging of the blogosphere.

Now I wish that my workshop at Kosmopolis had devoted time to stories like this. These experiences and issues are of urgent interest to journalists and writers who want to extend their reach and potential, and can use only technologies that are available at this very moment.

I’m not sad that I used my workshop time to share the more abstract issues discussed in my article Characteristics of new media in the Internet age. At an arts conference such as Kosmpolis, these should be discussed. But the day-to-day activities of the workshop participants need more immediate ideas for how to move forward too.

Rôo dissects several reasons for publishing online. The worst reason, in her view, is because no traditional publisher will take your work. That’s kind of pathetic: if no one wants your material in a traditional format, who will want it online?

For me, that’s not always a bad reason to publish online. We know at O’Reilly that many topics have small but passionate audiences (in other words, online publishing provides the long tail).

Another reason Rôo disparages for publishing online is just to use new technology for it’s own sake: in order to learn it, or to look cool, or because you think it’s expected of you.

The right reason to publish online, in her view, is to accomplish things that cannot be done outside the online medium. It is to understand the unique possibilities of new media and base new work on them.

While my talk at the conference was all about new media, I enjoyed a fascinating experience with old media as well. Journalist Juan Pablo Silvestre invited me to a show called Mundo Babel that airs on Sunday mornings on the Spanish national radio station RNE-R3 in Barcelona.

The format of the show is a kind of exploration of world culture. And the breadth of its scope (”…parallel worlds…a mosaic of races…a different vision”) as well as the reference to Babel in the name may be a warning that it veers constantly from one reference to another. But the execution is tightly controlled.

Silvestre is a masterful producer. The way he cues music and other recorded material while interviewing his guests, like a virtuoso musician conducting while he plays, impressed me highly while it distracted me considerably from following along so I was ready when it came time to answer a question. Silvestre makes what seems to be an offhand comment, then follows up with a recording matched to what he just said. Then there’s more talk, then music–and then suddenly a question, which the mesmerized guest is required to respond to. Juan Insua and publisher Enrique Murillo also spoke on the show I was on.

I got a chance to briefly answer the questions “What is Web 2.0?” and “Why is Web 2.0 important?” For the latter, I had a double answer. For web users, Web 2.0 lets them shape their browser experience they way they want through mash-ups. For content providers and corporations, Web 2.0 relieves them of having to think up every service their visitors might want, and therefore opens up innovation. I thought those ideas might be pitched about right for a Sunday morning radio audience.

Barcelona clearly prides itself on keeping current with technology and artistic trends. As Kosmopolis and Mundo Babel demonstrate, they can do so with flair.