back from a long weekend
hi everyone, i’ve been gone for the past few days and i haven’t been blogging. i went up to seattle to do some interviews (you can probably guess who) and stayed for the weekend. it was a pretty fun trip and i got to spend some quality time with my girlfriend and other seattle friends - and of course, it’s always great to make a visit on the corporate dime 
.
i hadn’t been keeping up on reading my feeds so right before my return trip this morning, i synced up onfolio. with only 35 feeds, i had a whopping 600+ unread items! granted, i subscribe to a few linkblogs and news feeds, but still, that is quite a backlog for only 5 days. i can only imagine what scoble’s aggregator looks like when he goes on vacation (he supposedly subscribes to over 1000 feeds).
i spent the entire plane ride reading through the stuff i’ve missed the past few days and i recognized a few interesting things:
- most events/products/ideas are covered simultaneously by tons of bloggers
- at least 75% of posts are just links to other posts, sometimes with a short comment or two
- feeds that only send synopses are really annoying
sometimes, as is the case with google’s autolink feature controversy, people are actually having conversations through posts (as in, they write posts in response to other peoples’ posts and so on). while i recognized the conversational nature of blogging due to the comments feature, i hadn’t really seen a conversation happen between blog posts.
this led me to thinking about how the commenting features work. perhaps instead of comments residing on the original blog, what should happen is comments on posts should actually become new entries in the commentor’s blog. then there should be an infrastructure where you can move through a blog “hyper-thread”, tracking the conversation. in other words, let’s turn the blogosphere into a big bulletin board but instead of being centered around threads, it would be centered around individuals. in this system, comments are obsolete and trackbacks can serve as the glue behind the scenes that ties blogs together. in this world, maybe sites like technorati will serve as directories of these “hyper-threads”.
sorry if this idea has already been done or is already underway and i’m just not in the know. if that’s the case, send me a link so i can check it out!
back to the original topic… being able to catch up on blogs on the plane was a killer experience. client side aggregators really shine through here but there are a lot of cool things about having a web based solution as well. i’m patiently waiting for a hybrid online/offline solution; i hope someone comes through sooner rather than later - and if anyone is working on one of these, let me know, i’ll definitely be willing to help out.
March 1st, 2005 at 12:55 am
Thanks alot for introducing me to onfolio. I can’t see how I ever went without using it. You know what would be nice, if you listed some of the more interesting feeds you suscribe to, to give others ideas. And I do agree with you about all the repeat info being given out. My news feeds are the biggest problem when it comes to this. It is sometimes nice, though, to get more info from two different sources or viewpoints. (I incredibally enjoyed the varying coverage on the paris hilton hack)
March 1st, 2005 at 11:45 am
Links in a blog actually say a lot about a person’s interests, political orientation, platform of choice, etc. A couple of years ago, I created a system called BlogMatcher that searched for blogs similar to a given reference blog, just by comparing links.
March 1st, 2005 at 11:59 am
Mark. I strongly agree with you that most blog posts are just blogs about other blogs, blogging stuff. I think this is a serious weakness in blogging especially as it becomes ‘trendy’ to be a blogger. The ‘Citizen journalism’ people talk about is being diluted by blogs just repeating other blogs. In effect the new media of blogging is doing what old media (TV, print) do now, like repeat TV shows, only blogs have started doing that a lot quicker.
I can see a premium set of blogs developing with original content, kind of like NBC, ABC and then lots of other repeater blogs like (TNT and FX).
March 1st, 2005 at 1:16 pm
i’m patiently waiting for a hybrid online/offline solution; i hope someone comes through sooner rather than laterAt the end of this post I pondered building a web app that would run in AOLserver on your local machine and act as a RSS aggregator but is also a web app. — work in any browser on any platform that can run AOLserver. Naturally, having it sync. to an online version (of the same app!) would be a trivial feature to add.
I’m going to go check out Onfolio and see if it’s worth the money. If not, I might just start working on my own AOLserver-based RSS aggregator service and product. Ah, but would it be worth paying for … heh!
March 1st, 2005 at 1:17 pm
God. I hate Blogger’s comment system. It doesn’t allow you to explicitly separate paragraphs with >p< tags, and messes up line breaks between paragraphs when you do use the limited markup available. Grr.
March 3rd, 2005 at 1:23 am
There is one option I know of for a synchronised online / offline reader. I’ve been using it for over a year now as a purely offline reader, and the latest version supports synchronising to either bloglines or newsgator online.
http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/help/1.0/bloglines/index.asp
March 3rd, 2005 at 2:03 am
How does this work? I’ve never done this before?
March 6th, 2005 at 11:51 pm
Livejournal does a “conversational” type of commenting system, with your comment being emailed to the person you’re responding to. Entire conversations, drama, flame wars etc are played out there as a result.
I recently moved my blog to my own site. While I miss the ‘threaded conversation/emailed to poster’ feature, I certainly do enjoy having more control over my own blog. Plus there was the sense of accomplishment in getting everything to actually work; as far as that stuff I’d have to say my expertise level is somewhere between AOLer and “drifting into intermediate.”
March 28th, 2005 at 3:43 pm
i only time i can have a conversation with you is when i comment on your stupid blog. i guess it forces me to read it.
April 1st, 2005 at 12:32 pm
[…] ed about wanting a tool that would correlate a conversation across multiple blogs into a “hyper-thread”. Well, looks like my requests has been answered in the form of blogpulse. It does exactl […]