Blog Implementations, commenting, and why everything isn't quite as good as it should be...
I've only been blogging for a short time compared to a large number of early adopters in the technology. While people tend to synonimize RSS with blogging, it really isn't, since the delivery mechanism, isn't necessarily as important as the large numbers of additional features provided by the blog engine itself. In a short period of time these features have gone from basic posting systems, added commenting systems, added voting, and integrated photo albums. When I go into my blog today, I have a full document management system at my fingertips where I can post code and articles that I can access from any computer with Internet access. Yeah, at the end of the day I rely on my RSS feed to push data down to subscribers so they actually see my new posts, but I don't need to publish any of my articles publicly unless I really wanted to. In that case, blogs lose their distribution status and are fully document management again.
That brings me to commenting and voting, two things that any document management system can easily supply through a form of meta-data attached to the original document. We currently have commenting, and to some extent voting (some implementations offer a voting system, others don't). The commenting in turn supplies us with a way to make our own annotations about documents we've read that interest us. The sad thing here is that the full potential of the commenting system hasn't been realized yet. For instance, there is the ability of registering trackbacks by making a comment with a link to another blog posting. In this way we have a kind of cross-referencing system. However, we may make comments without a remote post to link to, and thus our comment can possibly be a lost link. I definitely think there is enough information available now to improve the commenting system greatly. Take the following:
What we get:
- The ability to attach a comment to any post
- The ability to attach a comment with a link to another blog entry and thus create a track back.
What we need to get:
- The ability to be notified of additional comments on posts we comment on.
- The ability to have the remote site resolve our web url and see if it can notify our blog that a comment was made.
- The ability to categorize these incoming notations, so we can easily find posts we've commented on.
All of the data is there for the new features. Generally when posting a comment we supply at least an URL to our own website. If this site happens to be a blog, then a system could be in place to log our comment with our blogging system so that we have a central location for storing our comments and thus a reliable method to go find posts we've commented on in the past. The same system can also notify us of posts we've commented on that have new comments for us to go look at. At this level all of the new communications are between blog servers, and thus are document management processes, and not something we have to be part of.
You might say that local aggregators should perform this task for you, but having multiple products to interact with the same process is never a good thing. The entire reason I don't use Visual Blogger 2004 for instance, is that it only allows me to post new documents, and doesn't have the ability for me to aggregate posts as well. It isn't a one stop shop, instead it is a piece-wise utility. Instead I use RSS Bandit, but I don't make my posts through that system, instead I rely on the .Text system in order to manage my postings. It would take all three of these utilities together in order for me to have a complete blogging experience, when only a single tool should be required. I propose initial versions of such a tool be provided through a website, simply because the concept of accessing the management system from anywhere is a compelling feature.
At the end of the day, I'm already starting to lose stuff within my own blog. I have 25 separate categories for managing things, but even if I only put each post in one category, I'd have 9 posts per category. In reality, each post gets at least 2 or 3 categories of interest, meaning some categories have around 50 posts now. And that is only on my own site. I can't tell you how many comments I've placed, and now I've completely lost those comments, since I'd have to go back three months in searches to find some of them, and I have no record of them through my blog system or my aggregation client.
“We are always just a few steps away from being a few steps away...”