Library clips posts at length on how to record and organize conversations in the blogosphere, inspired by an earlier post by Glen Reid. It seems to me that the discussion of threads, or conversations in the blogosphere ought to be centered around two basic topics:
- Trackbacks only leave a record at the sink (that is to say, the post being referenced), not the source (the post doing the referencing). This means that reconstructing an entire graph of discourse requires a complete index of every post in the blogosphere.
- Conversations, or threads of discussion, are applications which have been thrust on blogging infrastructure, not one which it has been designed for. Firstly, there are two different locations for reading content: posts and comments. Secondly, if you read something, where do you reply? If I read an interesting post, I could reply in a comment or in a post on my own blog. If I read a comment on a post on my blog, I could reply in a comment (will the reply be read?) or use a new post and refer to the comment, etc. This means that one has to be vigilant in order to know when someone is having a conversation with you.
There are alternative (and better models) for community conversation: message boards/usenet - systems which have been explicitly structured to model conversations; and the Slashdot blog model which essentially hangs a message board or forum off each blog post.
As both Glen Reid and Library Clips point out, something needs to be added to the world of blogging if we really want the infrastructure to explicitly model what we traditionally think of as conversations. The proposal for using tags is not appealing as it would add even more noise to a very untidy annotation system (it would require some form of name space mechanism which folksonomists abhor).
There are other user facing problems with the blogosphere-as-conversation model. Firstly, the conversation as a whole is not visible - are you in the middle of the conversation? did this poster initiate the conversation? This issue doesn't occur in message boards as the community is fixed - it requires an explicit action to enter the community and thus participate. Secondly, there is the problem of mapping or picturing the conversation. Again, this is less of a problem in the board space as conversations are generally quite linear in structure and their presentation is a simple concatenation of posts.
BlogPulse' Conversation Tracker is one of the first tools that have been made available to general users to address some of these issues. It is restricted to forward looking link structure and presents the 'conversation' as a tree (which is in fact a simplification of the real link structure). Presenting the conversation as a graph is hard. Graphs have always been an attractive choice for selling a product with eye candy, yet constantly failed to provide an intuitive experience for the user. Kevin Burton's post on CNET's new graph visualization of themes in articles:
The problem though is that users don't like graph visualization. Even researchers have problems understanding graph visualizations. They're just a toy. While I commend CNET for shipping a cool new innovative tool I just don't see people using this on a day-to-day basis.
[Thanks to Sundar Kadayam for pointing out Library Clips' post.]
Comments