Mark Cunningham wrote:
No offense, but that's a silly reason to not do it.
I didn't say not to do it. I said that I'd be reluctant to do it using a technology that already has trouble combating spam. Trackbacks don't have a trust mechanism built in.
I'm not concerned about spam getting into the mailing lists, just with working around the brute-force and often ineffective methods of spam prevention in trackback systems.
Building a new protocol would mean gaining support, but trackbacks aren't supported by some of the biggest players either.
That's probably the biggest obstacle to this idea... even if I want to participate, I'm not going to be able to until I figure out how to incorporate it into Blosxom and Pollxn.
If people view their blogs as "platforms from which they talk to each other" then does it matter what you or I actually think it should be?
Nope. But then I never said what blogs _should be_. I'm just musing on what they _are_ and how people use them.
People are doing it. And do you need a coherent community for blogging? Planets/Feed aggravates, Blogrolls, trackbacks/pings, etc. all these technologies alow "conversations" to flow.
I don't think they allow conversations to flow... I think they allow fragments of conversations to reach a fraction of the people involved in them.
When you sign up for a mailing list, or read a (well-designed) web forum regularly, you get messages 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on. When you participate in the "cloud" of blogs, you get message 2, 7, 8, 3, and 19. It's a "conversation" in which all the participants can't hear, even if they wanted to, everything all the other participants say, because it's too hard to follow it all. There are people in the conversation that other people in the conversation don't even realize are talking.
The number one place I experience this is in blog comments, where the third person to comment on a blog posts sees what persons one and two had to say, but very often will never see what persons four and five have to say... even when four and five _directly address_ person three.
Blogs are rather messed up when it comes to having a conversation.
I think blogs work well when I have something to say, and readers of what I have to say want to say something _to me_ about it. But I think their ability for community and conversation degrade rapidly outside of that.
I don't see pushing blog entries and comments into another forum as a solution for this problem... it may carry the conversation to another segment of the population, but it doesn't help those who aren't reading that forum.
Often people will pull a conversation into actual forums.
Of course... and I'm leaning toward thinking that doing so should be a deliberate decision on a per-post basis, and not an automatic importing of every RPG related post.
I think that's where I'm not seeing the benefit, in the automation, and especially the usefulness compared to the time spent programming and maintaining it.
I always viewed blogs as being a sort of "distributed" forum. The Vanilla forum software comes to mind because it feels more like a community blogging than forum.
Only because Vanilla, like blog software, really lacks a lot of the features that proper forum software ought to have.
But the one place I participate in a Vanilla forum, it just feels like a bare-bones forum to me... I don't get a "community blog" feel from it.
I've turned a blogging software into a full realised forum, because the technology is the same. Call it what you will, a forum post or a blog post... at the end of the day, it's content that can make up a part of a conversation.
The issue isn't content, it's convenience of accessibility to the content in a way that improves the conversation. Or more specifically, will Karen's idea improve the conversation through added convenience? (And is it really added convenience or not?)
I think mashing up blogs and forums confuses personal soap box with community discussion, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.
Hey, this is the internet. It's everyone's personal soap box! Just look at what we're saying in this thread. I mean, who am I, to say that blogging is the same as forum? :)
My blog as personal soap box is not the same as this forum as personal soap box. Yes, we all give personal opinions in both, but one can assume that on your blog, you're the center of attention. In a forum, when you try to be the constant center of attention, you can disrupt community.
When I write something for my blog and then cross-post it to a forum, I always end up rewriting portions of it for the forum. Because the way I write in my blog is not always appropriate for how one should write in a forum.
But then, I'm also of a mind that three-quarters of what gets posted to forums should have been deleted before being sent. Forums are too often dominated by people with a tendency to post without substantial thought.
Here's another issue... I don't want someone posting thread-starters to a forum and then walking away from them and not participating in the discussion. But this feature could certainly lead to that when a hooked-in blogger doesn't really participate in the forum.
I think forum posts ought to come from someone who has real buy-in on the forum and not just a loose relationship.
That may be social... but then you have the overhead of vetting blogs, monitoring blogs whose bloggers _used_ to be part of the forum but really aren't any more, etc.
Besides, if it generates discussion and creates "community" then why *not* do it?
Generating discussion isn't equal to creating community. Discussions can destroy or fragment community. "Discussion" in itself is not a goal of mine. A fruitful sharing of ideas is my goal, and I'm not seeing the fruitfulness of this idea.
I'm not saying that it can't be fruitful, I'm just saying I don't see it.
