blog·lag (blŏg'lăg)
n. 1. The feeling that you should be commenting on another post, or creating one of your own coupled with the suspicion that you're too late and there's no point anymore since so many other people have responded already. 2. Any time you feel there is no point in blogging. v. intr. 1. To render other bloggers impotent by creating comments and counter-posts more quickly than they can.
Being involved in "conversations" is tough! Today I got involved in a series of posts that started with me reading Email vs. RSS on Fred Wilson's blog. It probably all started with Dave Winer's How RSS can bust through and just escalated from there. That was this morning.
Now, there is so much discussion, piles of comments and cross-posts that it's all turned to mush! In fact, there was still more to say. Most people are debating whether RSS will break through, but RSS is really a metaphor for the entire subscription content world. People need to look at it that way. I was about to write a comment, and suddenly I felt this pressure in my chest and a buzzing in my ears. My breathing became heavy. I wondered just what the point was of creating more mush when anything I say will get lost in the mire and the discussion is past the point of making valuable contributions? So, I collapsed in my chair.
I had bloglag!
After pouring a nice rum and coke, I realized that there are some real technology problems here. High speed blogging can be fun. But dangerous! Moreover, the pace of some blogs is slow while others are fast. Had I kept my nose to the wheel all day everything would have been fine. But, I had work to do! Blogging isn't my job!
Solving this requires a few things.
First, multi-blog integration of posts and comments is essential. Blog technology really is pretty primitive. The (unbelievably cool) new beta product, coComment, is a welcome addition, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. When I comment on somebody else's blog, there needs to be integration with my own automatically. More importantly, when I want to comment, but realize that a post is better, there should be a way to "migrate the comment" to a posting, completely with automatic trackback implementation. Only more integration will solve this.
Then, there need to be better comment architectures. Kuro5hin has a threaded comment chain (like slashdot). Maybe this is overkill. But, the often huge collection of 40 or 50 "stream of consciousness" comments on blogs like the Scobelizer can completely bloglag anybody else that wants to get in.
That's just a start.
Well, at least I tried to turn my headache into a productive post at the end of the day. I think the rum really helped.
Comments