Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Blogging: Conversation or Soliloquy?

Blogging should be a conversation, not a long-winded speech with scattered applause....

But it's not. Yet. Reminds me of an old family joke I share with my family, when trying to coordinate:
If you get there first, make a blue chalk mark on the door.
If I get there first, I'll rub it out.
Bloggers all reference each other, but other than the weak comment mechanism, it's hard to create anything resembling a global conversation. I know I've blogged about this before but it keeps coming back to me.

At Five Across we have some pretty great messaging software. I have half a mind to turn it into blogging software and start turning the web into a conversation.

2 comments:

weaverluke said...

I just found your response to my comment on your previous post on this topic—thanks. I checked out Somniphobia, and found it intriguing but not yet compelling. The trouble with providing (yet another) blog+ service is that people who would be interested in the service pretty much all already have their own lovingly-crafted blog. So we need to find ways of integrating with those existing blogs, right? Also, I couldn't really work out how the threading of posts worked in Somniphobia, but I did see something on emulating Apple Mail's intelligent sorting of junk mail for this purpose of threading like pieces. There probably is much mileage in that approach, but I think bloggers will certainly want more explicit mechanisms to thread their conversations—i.e. a button saying "reply to this". And of course, none of this can work across blog services without some kind of persistent identity mechanism...

Incidentally, I continued the discussion on Blog Evolution with Jean-Christophe on my blog:

http://www.i-together.net/weaverluke/2005/01/blog-evolution-2.html

Glenn Reid said...

I think you're right, JC. I think that it's a "downhill" model: one blogger makes a point, and the one commenting wants to start a conversation around that point. The original blogger may or may not want a conversation to evolve.

I have an idea about this, but I think I'll make it a post, rather than extending this comment.

Glenn