The tangled web of blog conversation
Last week I blogged about the new
Forum View that I have added to this blog. It seems like there is some interest in this approach. Thanks in large part to links from
Marc Canter and
Many-to-Many, the entry has garnered 9 links from other bloggers (see the cosmos for the entry
here), which is a record for this still-dawning weblog.
However, despite the interest, there has been only one comment posted in the "forum" for that entry.
I find this very interesting. One of the main goals behind the forum view idea was to encourage comments and discussion, and to make it easier to monitor discussions (to see if someone has responded to your entry or comment). Well, it didn't work... at least not yet. Perhaps this says a lot about the way bloggers prefer to engage in conversation: rather than post comments on another blog entry, many blogger choose to talk about it in an entry in their own blog (inter-blog conversation). There are both good and bad elements to this type of conversation. On the positive side, it inevitably results in more people reading the orignal entry (directly or indirectly). On the negative side it is not the most conducive to an interactive conversation, in which a person replies to one or more messages - like in a discussion forum. One significant difference is that the orginal author might not even realize that a 'reply' has been made in a another blog. Thanks to things like Trackbacks and
Technorati, discovering replies is easier (I use the
Cosmos Explore Bar daily for this purpose). Other replies can be found by digging through referer logs, but that requires even more effort.
By now, some of you reading may be saying "but trackbacks
are comments!" Well yes... and no. I do agree that inter-blog conversations are valuable, and that the resulting links can be considered 'remote comments'. In fact, I thought about this over the weekend - as I have in the past - about merging comments and trackbacks together -- using the forum view, if possible. I am not the only one to think about this, of course, and I found the
SimpleComments MovableType plugin which does exactly this. But this led me to think more about the differences between on-site comments, and remote-site comments. There are significant differences. A major difference is that a remote-site (trackback) comment assumes that the reader has not yet read the orignal blog entry. This is a reasonable expectation, naturally, and the first course of action is often to describe to the readers what the original post is about. The original post is often quoted in part, or even in full. This differs from a discussion forum-style of conversation that assumes that the reader has read not only the original, but also the subsequent messages in the thread. So less explanation is needed, and quoting becomes more selective, used mainly to respond to a particular point. Imagine a discussion thread where the majority of posts spend two paragraphs describing and quoting the orignial post -- it makes it difficult to see the
real comment. Wait a minute, perhaps that's a better description - rather than say that trackbacks
are comments, I think it's more accurate to say that trackbacks
contain comments. This particular 'intro' issue causes a specific problem when displaying trackbacks as part of a discussion: trackbacks only include a short excerpt from the remote entry, which is often this introductory element which further reduces it's value as part of the discussion view (because the actual 'comment' isn't even displayed). And what if you want to reply to a trackback? Do post a comment to the original entry, thus preserving the discussion thread? But if you do that, there is a good chance the author of the trackback will never see your reply, because it doesn't show up on their comments or trackbacks for
their entry.
I think some of these issues contribute to keeping most discussions short, in this tangled web of blog conversation.
