| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Glenn Reid is talking about threaded cross-blog conversations, something I happen to know a little about, having spent the last five years working on the integration of discussion and blogging. (Link via Blogosphere News.)
Here's what I left in his comments:
First things first:
If I'm reading you correctly, I've implemented the initial stage, using URIs as IDs. To start a thread, send a Trackback ping to this address...
http://support.journurl.com/?fa=pingthread&ref=http://someblogentry.com/
...where "someblogentry" is the permalink of a blog entry anywhere on the Web.
That's it. If a forum post related to that entry doesn't exist, a new thread will be created with your ping as the root. If a post does exist, then your ping will be added to the thread tree in the appropriate spot.
Right now, this is only enabled in the Sandbox1 category of JournURL's support community, but any JournURL-powered community can be used as a conversational hub in the same fashion. It can also be locked down, so that only authorized people can post.
And while the client-side UI is beyond my purview (I don't have access to an MT or WordPress install), it should be relatively trivial to put together. All you need to do is modify the existing posting bookmarklets for those apps/services so that they pre-fill the outgoing Trackback field along with everything else. Poof... blog away on your own site, while participating in a threaded conversation.
(Ideally, if this kind of thing took off, Trackback-sending apps would be tweaked to allow the full content of a post to be sent. But it works acceptably with just a summary.)
Second things second:
You have no idea how depressing I find these kinds of conversations. :D I've spent the last five years working exclusively on the blending of threaded discussion and blogging, and people still wander around going, "Hey, how can we do this?" I've got a few ideas over here. :)
Third things last:
I'm all for enabling outside "foreign" users and services to take advantage of JournURL's various features, so putting this together was no big deal. (90% of the code was already written.) I think the idea itself may have limited appeal, though.
Blog entries are more like "seeder" posts in a forum... they typically stand alone reasonably well, and spur descendant discussion. I suspect that a blog which is full of conversational responses to entries in other spaces will read like crap when viewed in isolation.
Given that JournURL has long enabled this stuff for blogs within a single community, I've even got some practical experience backing up the theory. When I decide to turn one of my threaded responses into a blog entry, I always feel pressure to change my writing style. I end up losing the casual flow I'd otherwise have, opting instead for more carefully structured paragraphs that will make sense when viewed without the rest of the discussion.
Don't get me wrong... if I didn't think it was useful, I wouldn't have put so much work into it. But it's not for everyone, by any means.
01-29-2005 07:49:01PM - Permalink - Post Reply - Read Comments [0] category: Staff
related topics: (blogging) (JournURL) (Trackback) (threading) (discussion) (conversation)