Newspaper site reformation 1.1

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?