What makes a blog a communication tool? It is the fact that blogs are published over the Internet. However, what makes blogs a possible communication tool between two people? It is the posts aggregator and search engines like Technorati.
How it works? Technorati give you the possibility to create a feed where all items are the blogs’ posts that link back to a specific URL. By example, here is the feed created by Technorati for the URL http://radio.weblogs.com/0140770/. Then, when someone on the blogsphere is blogging about something I wrote, and link back to my blog, I am immediately notified.
Sometimes, bloggers answer to a question or to a specific post by posting a post on their own blog. The only way to be notified that someone is talking about something you wrote is by using such services. It is also why linking is so important in blog posts: it enables people to follow discussions.
I think that eventually we will be able to talk about the Blogsphere as a: distributed discussion forums.
- The forums. The forums would be the Blogsphere in itself.
- A forum. A forum would be composed of the blogs sharing the same topic.
- The topic. The forum’s topic would be the blog subjects.
- The threads. The threads would be the bloggers’ posts.
- The messages. The messages would be the comments wrote by the readers.
The whole Blogsphere is slowly developing itself as this. I can only hope that it will continue in this direction. We now have the technologies to archive this goal and to build such a network.
Technoratie: [blogs] [blogging] [blogsphere] [forums] [Usenet]
David
June 5, 2005 — 8:31 pm
I totally agree. The hardest thing to find is good and similar (quality, subject) content on the internet in blog form. Who knows where it will go though…
Fred
June 6, 2005 — 8:32 pm
Blogs, and even more blogs systems, are young. They need to evolve in the next years. If people find good ways to manage the outputs that come from blogs, it will be an awesome source of information ๐
Salutations,
Fred
Max
June 6, 2005 — 8:32 pm
Uhmmm, I don’t completely agree.
>A forum would be composed of the blogs sharing the same topic
not all blogs are focused on a specific topic. Where would you put a blog who talk about US politics, children and recipes? I’d prefer to talk about single permalinks, or single blog categories.
>The messages would be the comments wrote by the readers
Comments, comments, comments…are we sure in your hypotetic scheme comments (as we know it) will make sense? What’s comments future? Why the best blogs (including Fredonsomething, of course ;-)have not so many comments?
If we choose to use links + technorati + feeds (or whatsoever), what will be the future of this little popup window I’m writing in?
Bye and thanks for your work, better than ever!
Max
Fred
June 6, 2005 — 8:33 pm
Hello Max ๐
It is sure that we could not really compare blog topics with forum categories (it’s really not the same thing and many blog, as mine, have more than one topic). But globally, I think that it look like this.
It’s sure that we can muse on the future of comments ๐ However, I do not think that every forum readers comments on forums. It’s the same for blogs: only few readers comment blogs.
It is sure that if every reader have a blogs, the comment section of blogs would be useless. However, I have doubts that all my readers have a blog ๐ But it is also sure that most of my comments are wrote by bloggers ๐
So I think that this is a good discussion to have… musing about the future of the blogphere ๐
Thank for your kind words Max!
Salutations,
Fred
Cary
June 8, 2005 — 8:33 pm
Great, great post…I’ve only been blogging for a short while, but I am already amazed at the inter-connectedness of it all…following conversations from one post to another. It’s a maze of blogging wonder!
Fred
June 9, 2005 — 8:34 pm
Hello Cary,
A blog is nothing… it’s only a little program that dynamially create a web page. The blogsphere is everything: this is the inter-connectedness of millions of people that had something to say about anything and that give you the possibility to comment the things they talk about.
Thank alot for the comment Cary, and keep going your good work with Cancer News Watch.
Salutations,
Fred
Cary
June 9, 2005 — 8:34 pm
Thanks for the kind words, Fred : )