I seem to have generated a little bit of discussion off of my comments on personality.
Netwoman responds to my post on personality, and brings up the idea of the "community" around a post, or around a blog.
One of the major problems with blogs (in general) and aggregators (in particular) is that they tend to be fairly static about which conversations I'm involved in. In particular, I choose a list of blogs, and my aggregator presents it to me. If I join a conversation on a post -- by responding to the post, say -- the conversation still drifts away into the past. I need to manually go out, remember that I've been part of a post, and check it for comments every once in a while.
Some people have gone ahead and attached a little RSS feed for each post, so I can (manually) subscribe to the conversation attached to the post. This is certainly a good start; it lets me track the comments on a single note, and turns the comment into a social, online place. (Sorry, LiveJournal readers: I can't imagine that under their dominant metaphor--that of "friends"--you'd particularly want to make "friends" with one of my posts, and the comments under it. But I could be wrong.)
Still, I can't help but feel that this isn't all. What if I was auto-subscribed to every page that I left a comment on? The metaphor is that I've got a stake in the conversation, now--so it adds me to the conversation. It's entirely possible, of course, that the conversation will go nowhere--but that's ok, the RSS feed will just fade off into the distance.
I'm not the first person to mention this-- see here for example.
Can we go a step further? What if my browser tried to subscribe me to an RSS feed for every page I looked at, if it's offered? Most of the pages are pretty static (so I wouldn't care) or are revisited frequently (so it would be mimicking my current behavior anyway)--but for conversations where I had clicked through the feed to the article, I'd get a little background on the page.
Now we'll need a few constriants: there are certainly some pages I would want to not remind me constantly that I'd touched them--but I wonder whether adding this sort of reminder would be a valuable tool? Sounds like I should push it onto my list of extensions-to-do-someday. (Can someone else? Please?)
August 29, 2004 07:38 PM | TrackBack | in Design