WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Threads of Conversation

Tim has added tracking 'bubblets' to his blog, and Boing Boing may have started a trend by adding Technorati searches for each article. - Dave has added them to his blog and to PlanetSun for example.

This seems a great way to avoid comment spam, as it means each posting is the accountable property of someone, somewhere. Eventually some low-life will start to run multiple spamblogs in order to get in on the act but at least it then becomes Dave Sifry's problem to fix instead of everyone's. It's certainly a step in the right direction.

What is that direction? I've been debating this with some colleagues and it's not as straightforward as it may seem. When we talk of 'discussion' or of 'comments' there are several different things happening under the same banner.

Quickies

Some comments are quick corrections, +1s, notes for the author, pointers and the like which aren't really appropriate for their own blog entry on someone else's blog. Ideally they'd be made directly on the page where the blog entry in question lives.

Dialogue

Some comments are responses that stand on their own merits as part of the overall conversation. Ideally these would be made on the author's own blog, but as part of the conversation they need to be threaded so that the reader can see the context in which they are being made. When they show up in a syndi-reader they would ideally appear not under the author's blog but as part of a threaded conversation on the subject in hand.

Meta-dialogue

Some comments reference other postings but are actually gathering multiple threads together. These again should be made on their author's own space but when it comes to gathering them they would ideally appear as footnotes or sidebars to Dialogue. Some of them may qualify as Refactoring

Refactoring

As conversations get mature, people often try to make summaries or to refactor the dialogue into a new document. These sorts of things are in my opinion best done on a Wiki rather than in either comments boxes or blogs as that allows all the people whose opinions are summarised to fix their own bugs

Tim's bubbles and Boing Boing's links are both attempts to add a GUI to the discussion flow. They suffer from a few problems:

• They don't show status. Those of us with blogs no-one comments on (or maybe reads?) would find this approach flawed because you have to click on every link to know if there is any conversation. One fix would be a count of the messages in the conversation that could be retrieved via a web service. This of course doesn't scale if it requires live rendering so it would be better if Technorati offered an event service to flag the arrival of an updated count
• It's not complete. You only get abstracts so you have to visit each site to read the conversation. Likewise,
• It's not threaded. Yes you get pointers to the conversation's body-parts but they are scattered all over the battlefield and it takes motivation to put humpty together again. Client-side syndi-readers can fix both of these things.
• The life-cycle is not shown. In the bubble icon, as well as a message count, some sort of indication of the status of the conversation in the lifecycle would be good. More on the lifecycle later.

Now, don't get me wrong - I think the desire to show conversations is a healthy step forward. It's just that it needs some more progress before it becomes a tool for the rest of us. Sam Ruby has made strides with his comment gatherers, I'm excited to see where people take the matter nex and I'll give them a try!

posted at 11:51 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Ironic

Just in case I've not got you checking the Ironic Times every Monday (much better than the past-its-prime Onion), this week's issue is a cracker.

posted at 10:52 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Just Transporters to go then...

Of course, there are some conversations that people might want to record, transcribe, annotate and file. Unlike a Star Trek transporter, I would be willing to help beta test this implementation of a communicator badge from Vocera even if it does require Windows. On a different note, does anyone know how a small company like this manages to get the BBC to reproduce their press release?

posted at 8:39 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

GPhone?

The fuss over GMail must have been worth any amount of advertising to Google (on the grounds that there's no such thing as bad publicity, although experiences this year make me doubt that a little), and I tend to side with Tim on it. But the thought of getting content-focussed advertising on something as personal as e-mail is actually a bit worrying - think how you'd feel if someone suggested doing it to your phone conversations. Bryan has a great illustration...

posted at 8:27 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Photo server down

Apologies for all the broken image links on the site - the server that hosts the images is down. I'll be working on it over the next few days.

posted at 11:23 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |