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Challenges of Conversing in the Blogosphere
By Cameron Sorden | July 10, 2007
Jeff Freeman had a post this morning about how he doesn’t like it when people post just to link another post– rather, he doesn’t like it when Google thinks it’s a whole new post. His post talks about a way to fix that, but I was more intrigued by something else he pointed out: It can be damn hard to find a consolidated conversation on a topic out here. All too often someone will bring something up, and five or six other bloggers will go “Genius! I’m commenting on this too.”
Now we have six blog posts about the same topic that are all inspired by the original post and each other. That’s fine, because it’s interesting to see the different perspectives, but the problem is that we also have six comment threads and you can’t even find them all at first because they don’t all link to each other. You start at the blog you normally read who links to two of the others, and they each link to two of the others, and it’s a whole big disjointed mess that you can’t make heads or tales of and it’s nigh impossible to get a good discussion going where everyone gets heard and sees what everyone else has to say.
I had an idea that could fix this which I posted at Jeff’s blog, but I wanted to repost it here so more people could see it. Let me know what you think:
Iād like to see some way to link conversations together, actually. It would be similar to ye forums of olde, but would still have many of the benefits of blogging (archival, fixed posting, do it on your own site).
Example: I make a post about How I Hate Gnomes. I get two comments. Darren of the Common Sense Gamer might also hate gnomes and get inspired to write his own anti-gnome post. Since heās really responding to me though, he presses a button and sends a ālink-lockā request to my post. I review what he wrote and decide that yes, these are similar topics that should be one conversation, so I approve his link-lock.
Now, on my site Darrenās post shows up as a tab behind my original post and on his site my post shows up as a tab behind his. Anyone going to either site can tab through all the link-locked posts that link into our conversation to see what bloggers are saying about this issue. Furthermore, all comments become consolidated from the moment I click āapproveā and blend together according to date posted. Thereafter, any comment on any of the link-locked sites gets copied to all the other link-locked sites so going to any one site can show you the discussion.
I like the idea, and it would also stir readership and get more people going cross-blog than currently. Thoughts?
Topics: Random |
July 10th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Genius!! I’m commenting on this too.
July 10th, 2007 at 7:45 am
Har har, Darren.
July 10th, 2007 at 10:28 am
It is one of those things that isn’t quite perfect yet, definitely. Maybe there is a way of tapping into the comments RSS feed to achieve this: take some reworking of the underlying blog software, but probably not much. Have the feed on the link-locked blogs checked automatically on a scheduled basis (hourly, perhaps)…
Seems quite doable, potentially. The main problem with Jeff’s idea is exactly as he points out, where to put the info so it had the proper scope: meta-tags might work, but that’d be cumbersome for feeds if I understand how that plays. This is more “pro-active” on the blog’s part, if you will…
Definitely an interesting concept. I like.
July 10th, 2007 at 10:59 am
I like it. A tab system like Gmail’s could do wonders for easy perusal.
July 10th, 2007 at 11:13 am
Doesn’t tracking/pinging-back accomplish this to some degree? I know it’s not quite as formal, but whenever I respond to a blog post on my own, I always include the ping- and track-back URLs.
Still, it’s surprising how often those ping/track-backs don’t even show up on the target blog’s site.
This simple step increases the continuity at least a little bit, but yea, a more tightly coupled system for comments would be nice.
July 10th, 2007 at 11:17 am
The problem with trackback is that you only get trackbacks on the blogs you link to. You might not link to the blogs that those blogs linked to when they were discussing it.
This idea would add a post to the “link-locked” collective each time someone posted a blog entry about the same topic and linked it in, allowing all relevant conversations in the blogosphere and their comments to be accessed from any one of the many posts in the link-lock (via tabbing similar to gmail or firefox but in-site).
July 10th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
This idea intrigues me. I wish I had the time to work on something for this, but unfortunately I don’t.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:27 am
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