Blogging frustrations - and a few ideas

Robert Scoble and I were trading examples of blogging frustration over breakfast this morning in Geneva. One of the things that came up and on which we agreed is that most blogging tools are already reaching the limits of their capacity to provide the platform of a real conversation.
In the last two/three years, blogs have opened up a powerful space for expression - and are having a huge impact in many sectors and fashions. In their current incarnation however, they are still more a place for "publishing" (one's ideas, opinions, experiences, life journal, discoveries,...) and for "linking" than a space for what Robert calls "conversationality" (his new book, which he wrote with Shel Israel and is about how blogs change the way companies communicate and function, is called "Naked Conversations" and I suspect that it will be one of the hot readings of the season).
What happens today, in a more or less sophisticated way, is: Blogger "A" publishes, readers and other bloggers read; readers comment on a separate "comment" page, while other bloggers comment on their own blog, perhaps using quotes from the original post and adding a link to it and to other relevant materials. Sometimes then, blogger "A" replies to those comments. Somebody else picks up the topic and this simulacrum of a conversation expands. But it expands in a scattered and random way, and (with maybe the exception of very specialized topics addressed by close-knit and relatively small groups) the participants only get to see some pieces of it. Why is it so? For example, because very rarely somebody who left a comment under a post goes back the day after, or a month later, to check if someone has further commented on it. Or because there is no way for me to track every post in the blogosphere that comments on my original post - and the comments that it attracts, and the further posts it generates on other blogs, which probably won't link back to my original entry, and so on: at a certain point, the thread in the "conversation" somehow gets lost.
Sure, Technorati and others are trying to make it easier to track discussions on specific topics - although they only capture part of the blogosphere and sifting through search results is not very efficient. Trackbacks and tags do help, but trackbacks are not universally implemented and seem to be used less and less, for whatever reason, and tagging is far from being an exact science. Feeds and feedreaders are a great way to manage quantity (Robert keeps track of several hundred feeds, I'm just below 100 and trying to remain there) but don't solve the qualitative problem of locating the next participant in the discussion you launched.
So, there is a need for the next-level blogging platform, and for new tools in the blogging ecosystem that could help turn blogging from an instrument of mainly self-expression into an instrument of interaction and conversation.
Here is a very simple example that Robert and I discussed this morning: why don't blog platforms such as TypePad, Blogger or Wordpress, have a "comment elevation" feature? If I get 50 comments on a post (I never do, but Robert does), a few of them may be just thank-yous or kudos; some may link to other posts, or offer tangent information, or be redundant; but some may really add value, complete a point you tried to make or debunk it. I would love a feature that allows me to read the comments and, just by checking a box and clicking a button, to "elevate" those that are value-adding to the main page: they would automatically be displayed at the bottom of the post, including the info about who wrote them, and I could reply to them there (that's a beginning of a conversation) while the other, less-relevant comments would remain in the separate page.
(Actually, during the discussion this morning I mentioned that at least one blog does something like that: DailyKos "promotes" posts from what it calls "Diaries" to the main page when they're noteworthy - but Kos works with specially developed software. Later in the day I discovered that John Battelle had a similar idea and has activated yesterday a new feature on his popular Searchblog, which he calls "Recent comment spotlight" - top left of the page - where he highlights readers' comments).
Here is another trivial idea: what about a feature that lets you, blog reader and comment writer, check a box if, after attaching a comment to a post, you want to be notified per e-mail about further comments by other readers?
Some blogging platforms may have already integrated similar features, I don't know all of them, but it seems to me that there is alot that could be - relatively easily - done at this level to make blogging a more powerful conversational instrument.
And then there is the much bigger question of developing tools that would help track discussions across many blogs (both posts and comments). Memeorandum is trying, Digg too, but they're both about "uncovering the most relevant items" rather than helping you follow your item - "relevance" has different meanings to different people. It won't be easy, but if blogs have to truly become the platform of a global conversation, blogging tools need to become much more sophisticated (without adding complexity for the user), and the "blogosphere" as an ecosystems needs some serious "organizing" (I'm using quotation marks because I don't want to be accused of wanting to stifle freedoms of whatever else: I'm not talking "control", I'm talking "readability" and "conversationality", and a conversation can only exist if you can hear who's talking to you and (s)he can hear you.
Your opinion?

UPDATE (6 Feb 06) - coComment: Making the blogosphere more conversational

Comments

[Alexander]

Indeed!
For Wordpress, there's the plug-in "Subscribe to Comments":
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
But even where that's possible, I rarely do so, because my e-mail client is not the most useful place for tracking comments.

Flickr has the "Comments you've made" feature which is beautiful, but of course it only works because all the pictures and comments are under the Flickr roof -- hardly a model for the blogosphere.

Maybe someone with the appropriate skills will build a Featured Comment plug-in for one of the more popular blogging systems, and we'll see if it catches on.

[Matthias]

It's a problem of too much success. Distributed conversations worked well when there were only a handful of bloggers vying for each other's attention. Now that there are millions of them, it's no longer a distributed conversation; it's more like a crowded market full of yelling fishmongers trying to sell each other their fish. In this situation, attention economics doesn't stand a chance. The whole thing's gone crazy.

[Alexander]

(Oh, and of course someone has already built a WordPress plug-in called "Comment Hilite":
http://rebelpixel.com/projects/rp-comment-hilite/ )

[BG]

Alexander: your comments point out that Wordpress seems today to be the platform with the best potential to become that "next-level" blogging instrument. No wonder many are moving there (if someone could come up with a WP plug-in that eases the "export" function from other platforms...). Matthias: maybe the problem is indeed too much success (and with http://www.blog.ch you're trying to put some order, but you are also demonstrating in one single page the amazing cacophony of the blogosphere), but maybe the problem is really just imagination: blogging platforms have been built as "easy publishing" tools, not as "massively distributed conversation" platforms. I don't know if the current tools are amendable.

[Matthias]

Manual trackback :-)
http://blog.ch/blog/archives/2006/02/04/keeping-track-of-blog-discussions-with-cocomment/

[jaah]

just use google blog search and sort by date

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=http%3A//giussani.typepad.com/loip/2006/02/blogging_frustr.html&hl=en

[jaah]

plus editorial approach. something like slashback

just post good or noteworthy comments from time to time on the front page

is it too hard???

[Steph]

Yeah, I was going to say you should keep an eye on cococomments :-)

http://www.ifeedyou.com/blog/cocomment-pour-suivre-tes-discussions-dans-la-blogosphere/1432/

I thought it was a great idea when Nicolas told me about it. I'm sure it (or something very similar) would help the conversational aspect of blogs a lot.

[Steph]

The waters are broken: http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/02/04/track-your-comments-no-matter-where-you-make-them/ :-)