BUMPzee Blog » Blog Archive » Where’s the discussion?

Where’s the discussion?

Over the years, two things have bothered me about blogs.

1. They’re chronological to a fault. This is great if you stay on top of a blog and watch the new stuff as it appears. It’s awful if a blogger writes some really great and fairly timeless piece, especially if they write a lot. Good stuff gets buried very quickly, often never to be seen again.

2. Discussions happen all over the place in blog comments and it is extremely difficult to notice them and if you do, keep track of them.

I’ve worked on a number of community related sites and I always have these things in mind.

On Bumpzee, I’ve tried to address the disappearing post issue by helping to keep the good ones around longer, those being identified with the most ‘bumps’. These posts end up on the list of top posts and stay there for as long as they’re deemed important, either by recent bumps or recent comments. When the buzz fades away, then the story does too. In that order, which is critical. The tagging also attempts to give stories more life, removing them from the fate of disappearing off a list because they became old, and putting them in context of similar posts.

The second issue, fragmented discussions, is addressed somewhat in that discussions can happen right here at Bumpzee. Since it’s a central location for people to post comments, they stay top of mind, and the discussions have a good chance of developing.

But, since the basic item of discussion here is a blog post, their discussions can, do, and should happen right on the blogs where they are posted. It’s very difficult to keep tabs on these discussions that go on all over the place. If you follow more than a dozen blogs, it’s all but impossible to keep track.

You can usually subscribe to comment feeds for a blog, but who needs MORE feeds? There is also a great service called co.mments which addresses this very issue for an individual who locates blog posts that they’re interested in keeping track of. This, however, requires that the user mark an indidual post for tracking.

But what happens so often to me is that I read a post early, often when there are no comments, the discussion picks up later and I miss it. This happened recently on Vlad’s blog. 25 posts later, I stopped by and saw that I missed the whole party.

So I’m attempting to address this on Bumpzee. Each entry may not only have comments here on BZ, but I’m building tools to keep track of which entries have comments going on at the originating blog. If there’s a good discussion going on somewhere, it deserves to be seen.

I’ve developed a new version of the widget plugin for Wordpress. It does all the hard work of reporting the number of comments back to BZ to store and show this number on the BZ entry for a given blog, like this:

Again, this functionality is only available with the new plugin, which isn’t generally available yet, but I’m about ready for some testers. Please let me know if you’d like the new plugin code.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 10:39 pm and is filed under bumpzee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Where’s the discussion?

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