Something that continues to amaze me is the fact that while the whole point of blogging is to share and communicate your thoughts and experiences to the wider world out there, the interactivity built into blogging software and formats is shockingly limited. If I wanted to communicate in a static way I'd put up a web-page not a blog. I put up blogs because I want them to become seeds for discussion points - to get other people involved and to get involved in return. But the only mechanism for discourse provided on most blogs is a space to comment. All very well, but once someone has commented, how can I, as the author or even participant, explore or take that thread of thought to its conclusion if I can't respond specifically to that comment? Writing another comment on the blog is not the same thing. They need to be directly linked.
And that in a nutshell is why most people just read blogs and never bother to comment, and why I believe that while blogs sometimes make interesting reading, as a community development tool they will struggle until their structure changes to become more like discussion threads. I can't see any reason for why blog softwares don't do this as standard, other than it's just the way they originally started in the primitive days of when web logs were simply online diaries. Unfortunately that basic static format has since become the norm.
The funny thing is that I clearly see blogs as the logical next step in online discussion, but while forums and discussion threads seem to be dying out or surviving firmly in computer geek world, no one seems to be making the simple connection and evolving blogging software to enable this extension. If I could write code, it would be my top priority!
This blog format of course is a perfect point in case. Go ahead and comment. You know I can't really reply and converse with you so we can't effectively discuss this much further. Not that satisfying is it??
