Welcome to Branchbeta

It seems like some of the basic elements of the form, such as comments, have been stuck in a model that doesn't work very well to encourage quality responses and also doesn't fit the way people do things socially online these days. Oddly, a blog comment isn't even as good a social object as a photo.

Off the top of my head: easier UIs for posting that can be as easy to use as something like Twitter or Facebook.

Also, I still want someone to build a web-wide version of Flickr's Recent Activity, but for any and all blog comments I've left on any site online, all on a single page ordered by most recent activity after I left a comment.

That's interesting -- I think Engage.io was theoretically trying to do some of that? But I looked at it and just saw OH MY GOD ANOTHER INBOX!!! and immediately closed the tab.

The whole idea of comments is based on the assumption that most people reading won't have their own platform to respond with. So you need to provide some temporary shanty town for these folks to take up residence for a day or two. And then if you're like Matt--hanging out in dozens of shanty towns--you need some sort of communication mechanism to tie them together. That sucks.

So what's an alternative? Facebook is sort of the alternative right now: company town.

Valid point, Paul, but what if the act of commenting were also the act of me starting my own blog?

I still think you'd end up with spaces people don't care about. The dynamic now is thread master and subordinates. There should be a way to enable peers.

Maybe this is something that doesn't have a technical solution. When you write a post Anil, the conversation isn't contained within your comments section. The "continuing the conversation" follow-up posts where you summarize great points from other sources serves this function. Maybe better tools could help streamline this process, but it's happening now with existing tools.

Take away the Facebook comments on your blog now and the conversation would still happen.

I've never much cared for comments. Probably because I don't care what most people have to say, either about something I've written or something I've read. Of course, I care a lot about what some limited number of people have to say. I think FriendFeed was on to something with the bifurcation of discussion.

Also, I'm surprised there haven't been more experiments with other modes of participation and collaboration.

BTW, Dave is writing about this recently:
http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/21/whatIsRelativeWriting.html

Yeah, I think Dave's been consistent for years that commenters should get their own blogs; TrackBack was predicated on the idea that was a viable course of action, so it's certainly not philosophically contrary to what bloggers (used to) want to do.

That being said, I think it's the on-ramp to participation that's broken. Not just signing up, but actually thinking "I'm a blogger" is a big mental hurdle, when in fact anyone who's ever updated their Facebook wall or left a comment is a blogger.

There seems to be something essentially right (despite the extreme complexity) in the forking model of Gists on Github, and if that could be made usable, then a comment as a way of forking your post into becoming the start of my own blog might be a big improvement.

Say you split the world into two groups: friends and not-friends. Your group of not-friends is most likely to open a firehose of noise. They're also the most likely to have extremely valuable information. So I don't think you can ignore them. That's why we write in public instead of on Facebook. And I think if other people realized the value of their not-friends, they'd be writing at least some of the time outside of Facebook. We can't know ahead of time who we want to hear from about any post.

(character limit! *shakes fist*)

So I think any system that involves selecting people ahead of time is going to be too limited.

Comments serve several purposes, they're not just about getting valuable information. They're also about showing that others are present and they help give a sense of how engaged people are with a particular topic. If we have other mechanisms for those things, comments themselves aren't as important.

Do blogs even need to evolve? And to what end? I feel like we're in a post-blog world, at least as far as the label is concerned. You either use FB or a Tumblr to update your friends and whoevers with what you're thinking. And if you have a blog, it really means very very long poorly edited posts with some angle (or more politely, a vertical) and a shantytown (love that pb!) of comments.

Aside: is there some reason I can't get a cursor in this textarea to change something I've already written?

Also where are the time stamps on this conversation? I feel anxious without knowing when people are saying things!

You can hover for date and time.

I still think there's value in owning a space. We have a zillion options for publishing, but many of them are tied into systems that could be working against the author in some ways. Facebook and Tumblr have angles of their own.

Maybe what needs to evolve is the idea that having ownership and control of your public writing is important. The word blog still has the connotation in my mind, but maybe it's lost that meaning.

Maybe I was too hasty to jump on a "comments" tangent. I guess what I crave as a writer is feedback, and that includes comments on my own post, twitter chatter about my posts, and posts on other blogs mentioning it. It's not all about ego, it helps me know what people like and respond to in what I wrote, it helps me be a better writer if people were confused by a core concept, etc.

I just wish there were better tools for feedback is I guess what I was trying to say.

Yeah, it seems there's a fundamental tension here between ownership and feedback. Every system that has great, immediate, large-scale feedback basically takes away all of your ownership of your content. And conversely, completely owned platforms are often ghost towns.

Is that intrinsic? Are there any exceptions to this that aren't (like MetaFilter) 10+ years old?

Back in the early 2000s I thought this problem would be solved by millions of special-interest aggregators that would gather distributed content and package it for people by interest. I even ran one for a while and I thought it was only one level of our brave new aggregated future.

ORblogs had the same problem as any public network: spam, commercial interest crowding out authentic voices, exponential growth. Fix those problems and maybe we can get back to aggregating.

I've been thinking about this a bit more and it feels like blogs have devolved. Tumblr feels like the awesome version of Blogger we released right before SxSW 2000. It's easy, fast, simple, etc. It's just like a 12-yr advanced version, an iteration of that tool, not a re-invention.

That said, I love using Tumblr, and find it better than any blogging tool I've used since Blogger. So do the tools need to evolve? Or maybe we're just old fogey edge cases?

I like Tumblr too, but it's a bit like saying, "I have the coolest landlord ever." Tumblr wants to have happy users, but they also have to make decisions to keep the operation going. And sometimes that could be at odds with what users want. They could sell the whole operation to AOL tomorrow.

A world where most people rent is a different world from where most people own.

Owning is more work. More responsibility. It also could potentially be more satisfying, but the best parties are at the rentals right now. We give up some control to have the instant network.

The big thing we missed with Blogger is the network. We competed for years on features—trying to not lose users to the power tools (MT and later WordPress), and not taking advantage of the fact we had all these readers coming to our (pseudo-) centralized system. From that, we could have built distribution and feedback mechanisms that are much more important than any other feature. Imagine moving your Tumblr or tweets to another system. It doesn't make sense, because it's about the network.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20. But we did think about it at the time: You guys remember the mockups we had for aggregating and putting posts on the home page? Later, at Google, we had a concept of "Blogger Hubs."

Funny you remember it that way, because I recall we had lots of ideas about doing more with the network, beyond the DRUL on the homepage. Kinja was an attempt to build that reading experience we discussed often. At Blogger we had no shortage of great ideas (oh all those *blog verticals we registered!!). We were hobbled by resources: financial, human, and technological. Imagine now with EC2, or Google Ads, or, well, just about anything (except the competition)!

So in short I'd say: we were aware of the network, we just weren't able to execute. And maybe it was too soon? Maybe other people wouldn't have been interested in the network (<-- not sure I believe that.)

Paul, been thinking about your landlord vs renter analogy, not sure it's quite right because I'm not sure people *want* to own. It's often like owning a run-down Victorian, you always have to replace pipes that are bursting, plaster walls that collapse, etc. etc. People buy new houses because they don't want that work.

There's still a tech hurdle that many people don't want to deal with. Heck! I don't want to deal with it, that's why Make It Do is on Tumblr.

But I'm not convinced people view what they're doing as producing content, nor thinking it's something they should own, anymore than I want to "own" my phone call with a friend. (Sure I don't want someone to record it and sell it, but that's different.) My call is ephemeral, and it's about conversation and communication, not content.

Also ARGH! This arbitrary character limit is making my post look like crazy multi-posts! It's still the same point, chunked up for no apparent reason.

So that point is very, very interesting, Meg: What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.

I do agree so much of why people don't value ownership in social media is that they see it as conversation, not content, but that's often because we don't *know* in advance when it becomes meaningful.

And as far as building network effects goes, I think the MT-WordPress battles over TrackBack vs. PingBack (amongst other stupidity) really shortchanged the potential of building a decentralized network. I know at Six Apart, we *got* Blogs.com as a domain name specifically so that anybody could ping it with whatever their blog post was about. (Back then it was categories, not tags, but picture the way Flickr aggregates by tags.) And of course Technorati tried to do that, too.

But basically nobody's ever made a blog post a social object in the way that Flickr made photos social objects. That is still a glaring omission. Is that intrinsic, or something that could be fixed? What if "liking", for example, worked across (say) Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr?

Maybe I can frame it better. Think about Kottke or Daring Fireball. They own. And they own their network. If their ISP goes down it's a hassle. But it's just a matter of copying files to a new ISP. Their infrastructure is a commodity, not essential to what they're doing.

For people who rent, the service is everything. If Tumblr or Twitter or Flickr fails, their network fails with it. The value of owning is forming a stronger, more resilient network.

Well I certainly wouldn't take that deal, as I said "I don't want someone to record it and sell it, that's different". Should have been "or", but it is different. Some people probably would sign up for that deal, especially if the alternative was digging up their driveway and running jacks throughout their house to have a phone. (Ok, hosting's easier than that these days, but I'm not sure installing and maintaining MT is!)

And meaningful to whom? To the world at large? To just me? To my friends? Maybe that's what Stellar is for, to mark something as "this might be important down the road" or "this is important/good right now" Surely we don't need to all host our own content in case it becomes meaningful down the road? And to that point, I recently re-read most of Megnut.com and it's FULL OF CRAP! Maybe 5 posts out of 3,000 seem meaningful.

Paul, true, and I agree. But consider the size of the networks you use as an example: Jason and John have tremendous amount to lose by not controlling their networks. These blogs have millions of pageviews and generate their income. They are the edge cases, not the norm.

Anil! Ha! Liking across platforms. See, I already mentioned Stellar above!

Meg: To clarify, I was saying we *did* see it but we didn't build it. And, after you guys were gone, I didn't prioritize it highly enough to get it built. (Of course, mostly I was working on keeping the servers running.)

Ev: Ah ok. Phew! I was thinking "How could you not recall all those conversations?!" :)

At what point should a writer be worthy of owning their network? At a million pageviews? A thousand? Those are edge cases today because blogs need to evolve.

Yeah, there's an interesting infrastructural underpinning to a lot of this conversation. Running servers used to be hard. Running databases used to be hard. Having to invent or customize a lot of infrastructure was much more of an explicit burden and limitation to the ideas than I think we've ever articulated.

I mean, we all know "it's so much easier in the cloud today", but the actual cost in *features and capabilities* is pretty dramatic.

Decentralized networks have huge problems: You can't (deeply) innovate, and you can't create a consistent user experience. That's why centralized networks will win (/are winning), even though that's not a popular thing to say in geek circles.

I used to agree with you, but I think it's not intrinsic, Ev, it's just an artifact of crappy implementation so far. Skype and Spotify are innovative, consistent, decentralized user experiences which also incidentally send data in a peer-to-peer fashion. This is just a problem which hasn't been solved, not an inherently unsolvable one!

I'm not saying it's not important or valuable to own/host your own content and network but the pain of doing so, even in these "cloud" days, is still difficult. Seriously when I set up my Tumblr, I couldn't be HOW EASY it was, even to customize my template. I had a design, I made a custom template, and it wasn't even two hours! Try that in MT. Never going to happen. Never mind installing, etc.

Also I agree with Ev re: decentralized networks. That's what made original Blogger so fantastic: hosted app and you got your content on your server. To which I might ask Anil: did we "solve" it with Blogger, and did it turn out not to work? Or is it really all crappy implementation? Everything's a give and take, hosted vs install. I have a hard time imagining how you solve this. But I guess that's the point of your question! :)

Very true, Meg. DIY hosting is still difficult. And unfortunately weblog tools morphed into the general purpose content management systems we were sort of rebelling against with Blogger. We called Blogger a "lightweight CMS". They all got pretty heavy.

Anil: Maybe we're talking about different definitions of de/centralized. Skype is a hybrid system from a technical perspective. (I don't know much about Spotify.) But they're both centralized from an ownership/control perspective, are they not?

Picking this thread back up (since lots of folks seem interested in the conversation!) -- yep, Ev, I was talking about decentralized from an implementation standpoint. I think if that can be pulled off, then decentralization from an ownership and company standpoint can follow, as we've seen with email or jabber-based IM.

Relatedly, some great thoughts from Dave:
http://scripting.com/stories/2012/03/05/futureBlogging.html