Blog Trees

I more or less agreed with Ketcheson in his problems with wikis, yesterday. Wikis are conceptually great -- a way for people to collaborate a la' Wikipedia -- on whatever sort of endeavor. However, I think most things that we want to collaborate on are not like Wikipedia, and as a result, the actual nuts-and-bolts reality of wikis just wind up being a barrier to collaboration. I am not going to write seventeen paragraphs about why: I am insteda going to jump to a new idea. Maybe soemday I will backfill the twleve thigs I hate about wikis, or whatever, but not today.

I had an idea (uh-oh), for a new sort of social media tool, one that has some of the high-level motivations behind wikis, but really an extension of how blogs work. Anyway, I thought I would start spelling it out, here, and get some feedback, before trying to build a version.

Blogs are -- looked at from one perspective -- a series of posts chronologically ordered, and perhaps indexed by catagories and tags.

Imagine, however, if we thread back into the core elements of blogs the idea of RSS feeds, and drop out some of the afterthoughts to blog that don't really fit, like comments.

What? Comments don't fit? Wait a second! Blogs are a social medium! It's all about conversation! How could comments be an afterthought?

They are, really. Why aren't all comments just blog entries, after all? Why are track backs and comments different things? The answer: blogs were initially developed before comments and trackbacks existed, and they were jimmied onto a pre-existing model. And then RSS came along, even later.

A New Take: Blog Trees

Imagine instead the following model: I create a new blog -- the nature of which I will describe -- for the purpose of conversing with my partners about the Blue Whale Labs business: it's called 'Blue Whale Labs Business'. I invite my partners.

I create a few posts, one about sales goals for the quarter ('Sales Goals for the Quarter'), one about marketing ideas, and one about hiring. But with the new sort of blog I am using, my partners don't create 'comments' to respond to something I have written: everthing is a blog post. So, if Greg or Ranvir want to weigh in on the sales goals, they could create a new blog, for example, called 'Re: Sales Goals for the Quarter', in the context of the initial blog post. The new blog would be embedded directly in the first. This might look like this:

Looks a lot like comments, although just nested in the presentation. But what if I decide that Ranvir's comment should be an individual blog thread of it's own? Through some simple (not displayed) UI, the hypothetical blogging tool would allow me to designate Ranvir's post as a new blog, one linked into the current context (underlying RSS magic!), and then it would display this, after I added a post to that thread and changed the name to make it more obvious what we were talkign about in this thread:

Note: in my hypopthetical system, all the blogs would be accessible individually, from a category, name, or tag search (I haven't shown any tags, for simplicity). But this collection of blogs are also contextually linked, as in this scenario, or by using more-or-less conventional trackback mechanisms.

The real thought here is that a wiki-like expansion of structure would be supported in this "Blog Tree" model. Any one participating (presuming they were granted rights to do so) could create a new blog, in context, extending the topics explored within an existing blog post. We would not be limited to the blog post/comment/trackback model, now in use.

Also, since the new blogs are conceptually embedded in the post, display option could be provide to make interaction more interesting.

For example, imagine that when I created the initial "Sales Goals For The Quarter" post in the Blue Whale Labs Business blog I stipulated that the post should be displayed as one of the topmost ten posts for the next few weeks, overriding the default model of blogs where chronology determines presentation. Similarly, when I pulled Ranvir's post out and made it an independent but embedded blog, I might have stupulated that the five most recent posts in that thread would be presented within the context of the "Sales Goals for the Quarter" post.

Imagine an even further nesting of blogs within blogs.

Here we see that the discussion about Killer Whale stock finances triggers a thought about a specific deal, and that leads Greg to create yet another blog to discuss that deal. Note: he might have created this post in an existing blog -- the "XYZ Project Blog" for example -- and simply have directed the blogging system to pull in any posts there tagged "stock" (although I haven't shown any tags). Or it could have been a brand new blog, created in context.

Note also that in this picture I have included some "expand/contract" twiddles on the various blogs, suggesting some ideas about how such a tree blog system could be made intuitive, or at least manageable.

Also not shown are the various RSS feeds here. Each blog has its own, and they would automatically roll up. So If I was subscribing to the Blue Whale Labs Business blog, I would be getting a stream with all this info in it. Alterntaively, I could opt to only get the RSS feed associate with "Sales Goals For The Quarter" which would include the RSS feeds from the nested blogs, unless I wanted to exclude some specifically.

More importantly, blogs -- not just blog posts -- would be tagged in this system, so I could be selecting for all blogs in the Blue Whale account having to do with HR, or design, or contracts, and pulling those feeds.

Conclusions: Blog Trees

I think that blog trees are an interesting social media experiment waiting to be tried. I plans to do some investigation, and see what we can do in the Labs to try to get such a project going.

Any entrepreneurs out there hoping for a hot idea to jump on? Any investors eager to fund a cool idea? Any established blog (or wiki?) companies interested in a minor breakthrough?

tags: blog+trees, killer+whale+program, social+media, wikis, blogging

Comments

[Jeff Hester]

Stowe: I completely agree that wiki technology can get in the way of functionality for most people. Great idea to allow each "comment" to be addressable as it's own blog post. Also handles threading.

[Thomas Purves]

Stowe, you are onto something. I don't know if I fully grok yet your solution but I'm with you at least as far as the idea that "there's something funny about comments".

People praise "the conversation" but at the same time are often loath to relegate their response to a simple comment. If I have a blog, and I'm inspired by your post, why would I give you all of my good stuff for your blog? If my commentary is any good, I'd rather make a fresh blog post of my own and get the traffic for it myself.

I guess this is what trackbacks were invented for in part. But trackbacks aren't particularly reader friendly (who even clicks on them?).

Comments are definitely a model worth re-thinking if you're in the business of, say, designing new social media tools.

[Zoli Erdos]

I (amost) said you were reinventing Wetpaint:-) Well, not really, but it's already a hybrid between a blog and a wiki.

"Comments" have more prominent placement then most blogs/wikis have, they really appear to be part of the oroginal page, and they can be nested - so there's one way to have a tree.

The actual "pages" can be navigated in a tree - but for now they are all sorted alphabetically, by default... and this is where my disappointment comes. Several months ago Wetpaint was planning for two more sort options:
- reverse chronological, a'la blogs
- user defined, which would bring it to what you envision with the blog trees.

[Carter Harkins]

I completely agree that blogs are often pressed into service to handle tasks for which they are not optimized. It's what inspired us to build a new social media platform for podcasters, vloggers and other time-based media content creators. I got tired of trying to contextualize my comment about a video in a blog comment. (i.e. "at 4:35 you said blah blah...well, I say yak yak.") Now, posts and comments about the media live at specific points along the timeline for a much more intuitive, efficient and contextual conversation. And additionally, audio and video posts and comments were a necessity for a multimedia blogging platform.

Interestingly, we made a similar decision to build in the possibility for anyone to create posts of their own about the media source being viewed in the conversational player, rather than relegating that prvilege to one person, while secondary citizens get only "comments" leftovers. AND we made sure that there could be multiple (literally thousands) of conversations occurring simultaneously and fully separately around the same media sources on the web.

I'm encouraged to see a discussion like this. I am and have been ready for a few shifts in the blogocracy.

Carter Harkins
Intrascopic Media Inc.

[Chip Griffin]

I think you make some good points, but I guess I don't fully understand your idea. To me, it just seems like a little tweak on old-fashioned message boards, not some radical change to the notion of blogs.

[Joel Moss]

I love it Stowe! It really compliments what I have recently been thinking about at my blog at http://tooum.net - social commenting for blogs/forums.

[Brian]

But isn't that already accomplished with one of the earliest online social technologies, the message board/forum?

[nate]

Stowe, I've been thinking about this kind of thing for almost 2 years now. Your vision is great for blog trees. With a few tweaks, it's almost exactly my vision as well.

Thank you for bringing it up, and if you would like some help working some of this out, I'd be more than happy to dialogue and participate. Let me know.

[Peter Lee]

I definitely agree about wikis being suited for some tasks, but not most. This is a neat idea you're proposing: taking blogs/comments and building Blog Trees as an adhoc ontology. The multi-dimensionality of the interface would be pretty neat too. (Although I agree that creating an easy-to-navigate UI would be the hard part)

We've had some similar ideas with our product Coventi Pages (www.coventi.com). Coventi Pages is an online word processor with a major focus on contextual collaboration and discussion features. Here's a quick video about what we do:

http://www.coventi.com/videos/IntroToPages.aspx

In any case, I'd say we're a similar concept, but at a different level of granularity. We're interested in tracking and organizing the feedback and discussion that goes into creating a document. Like you say, wiki-style collaboration (everyone's an author) only works in some cases: when you're aggregating content. But when you're working on a "document" (say a press release, blog post, product spec) and sending it around to your team for signoff, what you're probably looking for is feedback, not co-authors!

We've concentrated on putting "comments in context" so that Reviewers can have real-time discussions tied to the text of a document, without changing the text itself. It's a powerful interaction for the reviewers (since it's easy to give feedback, plus you can respond to others in real-time) and for the author it's a really nice way to organize feedback. Much easier than wading through a bunch of emails ("reword paragraph 4")and track changes. (Maybe that's similar in concept to the RSS rollup features you've brainstormed above)

In any case, I think there are some nice parallels to what you're proposing with Blog Trees, and I'd be interested to hear what you think about Coventi.

[James Corbett]

Great post Stowe. I've been thinking along similar lines recently and even made a prediction in December that 2007 would see the death of comments... as we know them. But I'd go further than you in separating the content from the presentation. My idea is based around the belief that aggregation is the new browsing and that people we'll largely stop browsing the web, instead letting the web browse us! So Google Reader will become Google ReWriter, evolving into a full microcontent editor.

One of those microcontents it will support is of course the Comments format. Thus, when I come across a post to which I want to add my 2c I will hit the 'c' shortcut key to add my comment, just like I hit the 't' key already to add my tags. Tags are the harbinger of Google Reader's ReWriting functionality but it will no doubt become a fully featured annotator/aggregator. The new web, the live web, is all about annotation.

Remember that wonderful 'The Machine is Us/ing Us' video on YouTube? What's the machine using us for? To make sense of the world - to annotate it.

[Stephanie Booth]

I feel I need to take a closer look at this. I don't like threading in general (particularly in comments) as it tends to dissolve the conversation rather than bring it together. Humans don't think in threads.

But here, maybe...? Will take a second look.

[Sean Murphy]

Private wikis for a small project team (less than a dozen members) have a very different feel from Wikipedia and other large open wikis that allow for anonymous users. Wikis dissolve authorship, so the team must be held jointly accountable for the outcome. Blogs preserve authorship, as do forums. So where individual authorship is important, either because there isn't a common goal or shared set of incentives for the participants, or because one of the goals is to preserve a spectrum of opinion instead of arriving at a working consensus, use blogs or a forum. One blogging tool that implements your "trees" (at least to the extent that I truly grasp your idea) is Traction Software's TeamPage. See http://www.tractionsoftware.com/

[Joel Moss]

@Brian: Yes, but why not with Blogs? What I am trying to do is combine them both, as a forum is essentially the same as a blog. And integrating the two has not been done before.

[jeff angus]

Stowe: FUNCTION FOLLOWING FORM

It's an additive idea, but I'm not sure it addresses the most in-need-of-improvement barriers imposed by blog linearity (reverse chronology of posts / reversed-reverse chronology of comments, an absurd organization that defies normal cultural affordances) or by wiki linearity and lack of applied priority based on value or context.

As Booth noted in a comment, it's threads (made more graphically appealing, at least for up to a couple of layers). But in the end it's an outline. It will appeal to outline, hierarchical-tree organization lovers, Sensate/Thinking types. It's an improvement on existing Web 2.0 models (though nothing we haven't already had in applications such as PC Outline since DOS 2.0).

I guess I would judge it a logical addition, but, again, not freeing us up from the serious limiting factors existing tools impose.

[pop]

hehe, great one ;)