Lazycoder

blogging as conversation

The Scobleizer — Michael says weblogs not conversational

I think Scoble is missing a “Groups” tab at Google. His point is probably that NewsGroups don’t show up in a Google web search and that Technorati and Feedster don’t look at newsgroups….

OF COURSE THEY DON’T! They aren’t designed to. That’s like saying “My CD player can’t read those eight track tapes.”. I wouldn’t compare blogs to newsgroups or email or any other technology of yesteryear. The one old recylced piece of technology that blogs most resemble is the BBS. Back in the day anyone with a computer and a modem had the capability to set up a BBS. People could dial in, read messages you posted in your BBS area, download files, play games, etc… The point is that each BBS reflected it’s owner is some fashion. I met a lot of good friends by linking my BBS to other BBS’s through a “favorites” list. We even set up a small networked message board in Wichita using WWIV software so that several WWIV BBS’s in our area all shared the same message base.

The only part that annoys me is the promotion of blogging as new. Those of us that knew how put up web journals a long time ago. I even had one back in 1999. I wrote in in classic ASP and then ported it over to PHP. I plan on importing those old posts into my personal web log (located here at some point. You can see some of them here

I don’t think that RSS is a new idea either. Microsoft came out with the CDF format back in IE 4.0. People say it didn’t pick up because it was a “push” technology. People didn’t want stuff getting “pushed” to them. No, people didn’t want all the hassle of setting up the active channels, not to mention that the desktop dragggggggged as soon as you checked “show web content on my desktop”. My father signed up for Pointcast and he’s hardly what I would call a technology sophisticate.

Email syndication has been around forever except it’s called a “mailing list”. You can either receive each and every post as it’s made by someone or you can receive a digest of all the posts for a day/week/month/whatever. The fact that the ideas are recycled is not the point. After all recording sounds and images to a portable medium, be it magnetic or digital, has been around forever, that doesn’t mean that CDs, MP3, or DVD are any less important. It took me a while to dive into CDs when they were first released. CDs cost $15-$20 but I could buy a tape for $10 on sale. There wasn’t any kind of cost differential between CDs and MP3 so I adopted that quickly, well as quickly as my 1x CD-ROM would let me rip. It’s the same with RSS, there are plenty of free aggregators out there (in my day we had to write our own screen scrapers we weren’t provided with a nice feed. Damn young’uns) so reading the feeds is not a problem. Creating a conversation between all the feeds is.

You can see that the need for a conversation is handled in most blogging software. e.g. The comments section attached to each post. But unlike the old networked BBS message boards (like WWIVNet and FIDONet) there isn’t anyway to link between the blogs. The referrer log works in a similar fashion but only for the owner. The trackback is a good attempt, but it doesn’t provide the same pure experience that RSS does; it doesn’t aggregate all of the relavent posts, it just provides a link to the posts that refer to the parent post. The worst thing is, to follow the distributed conversation I have to leave the aggreagator and read the posts in a browser. A comment feed doesn’t work either because it often just shows the comments for EVERY post on the blog, there’s no threading or even relation between the comments. What we need is an aggregator for the distributed conversation that happens. But once we have that, haven’t we come full circle back to newsgroups and message forums?