It seems that there are two problems with blog discussions that use comments:
- People who start a discussion by commenting a post didn’t seem to check back for new comments on the message.
- If the post is older than some days, nobody will comment on it.
Some will say that this is normal because blogs are used to publish thoughts of the moment and old thoughts didn’t worth commenting. If they see blogs as this, they are probably right.
The thing is that I don?t see blogs this way. Blogs seems to be a really interesting knowledge management tool. In this optic, it would be healthy to comment old posts: to upgrade the idea behind it with the new knowledge people have at this time.
The problem is that nobody will see these changes because the posts will be lost in all other new posts.
If we take as premise that comments are integral part of a post, with the same information value, would it be interesting to change his position in the lifeline of the blog with an updated date? A good way to do this would probably to include an “update” section that relate the last changes performed on posts. A change would be an update in the post?s body or a new comment posted on it by a reader.
Think about Wikis; it would be a good and elegant way to give life back to old posts (ideas, knowledge).
Few blogs had implemented comments feed. The idea is good but are they increasing the life span of blog’s discussions? Take Scoble?s comment blog (are you reading all “scoble” words of the Blogsphere’s posts? ๐ ). Is it increasing the life span of his posts? I don’t perceive it. If the post is the sixth of the day, comments attached to it will fade out and the post will be leaved for death.
In this case, would a solution be to include comments in the main feed of the blog? Have in mind that we are thinking with the assumption that comments are integral part of a post, with the same information value. Personally I think that it would be a solution but it wouldn?t be applicable with the current RSS specification; it just not specified for this purpose.
Finally, I don’t think that current blogs’ structure is well built to give a respectable life span to posts. It just can’t work well with the current structure.
Max
March 13, 2005 — 5:58 pm
Hi Fred, I was thinking to publish a post about this problem, but I had not time to develop it. So, because the draft is still on my hard drive, I’ll use it as a comment hoping to add something useful to yours.
“Any time I have to paint something (gates, walls, windows, fernitures, etc.), I put some old newspapers on the floor. You too?
Old newspapers are practically useless: the average lifetime of a newspaper is about 1 or 2 days.
Blogs are not newspapers, anyway: the old posts, via their permalink and their searchability through search engines, never get old.
If you write today “max at eleven” in Google, at the first place you don’t find the post you are now reading, you find an older one.
So, if you are not a reader of my blog, you come to meet it by that older post.
This is an enormous difference we know between blogs and newspapers.”
Fred
March 13, 2005 — 5:58 pm
Thank for your additions Max! News paper also have a permalink: it’s their date. There are system availbe to search newspaper archive to find old articles that talked about the first Iraq war for exemple. But as blogs… they are less read the week after their publication. One of the problem in both systems is probably the way search systems works for each of these systems. There are probably too many information available for the search infrastructure we are using these days. So I don’t think that there are a really great diffenrences between the two system; it’s just that the search system for newspaper archives is not free and less easily accessible. Salutations, Fred