Blog 2.0

[coalescent]

Compared to something like Usenet, weblogs in general suck as a discussion medium. There's issues with discussing on someone's journal, rather than discussing in a neutral space, and there's the fact that any conversation scrolls off the bottom of the page in short order, effectively ending the debate. It's also impractical to browse old posts for content . Where livejournal is concerned, comment emails help with the first problem, but they don't solve it entirely, and there isn't an easy way around the second. So here's an alternative that I really like:

Create a blog that is a front-end to a web based bulletin board. So every article on the blog starts a thread on the bulletin board. Then you can read comment threads through the blog front page (in which case you get the threads started by the most recent articles), or you can read comment threads through the bulletin board front page (in which case you get the threads that were most recently posted to by anyone). And on the bulletin board you could let anyone start their own threads in response to the general lines of discussion, though they wouldn't necessarily show up on the front page. You could even have multiple peoples' blogs linked to the same bulletin board.

Has anyone actually seen this (or something like it) implemented anywhere? Does anyone else think it sounds kinda neat?

Comments

[azureskies.livejournal.com]

No, and Yes :-)

Re:

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

The original poster is talking about trying to put something together. I'll let you know if anything comes of it!

Come to think of it, you could also make it more usenet-like and have one blog linked to multiple message boards, divided by topic. Hmm.

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

This weblog has something like what you're describing:

http://stuarthughes.blogspot.com/

Click under discussion. That said, this is obviously a much simpler version.

[(Anonymous)]

http://ilx.wh3rd.net/newanswersblog.php?board=2

[(Anonymous)]

<pred>You can do all this with a wiki.

"Front-end to a web-based bulletin board" is so wrong it makes me want to cry. A web-based bulletin board is a front-end, a front-end to a threaded discussion system; the front-end is just a way of looking at the real thing, which cannot be directly perceived by our puny human senses.

Anyway, what he basically wants is a newsgroup, and then some
sort of LJ-like web interface. So, you'd have alt.livejournal.coalescent, and you'd post to it like you'd post anywhere else (with appropriate crossposts if you want them), then you'd have a website which just scraped your personal group and made it into HTML. That would be pretty easy. Since not every newsadmin in the world would want to carry every blog in the world, you might just host those groups on LJ's own NNTP server, which would make fully general crossposting hard (you might not be able to crosspost to LJ and, say, Blogger groups at the same time with a vanilla NNTP client; although, come to think of it, there's no reason why the LJ server wouldn't accept crossposts to Blogger, and forward them, it just wouldn't store them locally).

Yeah, thinking out loud here, sorry. I don't think what this guy's proposing is all that hard, provided you're smart and secure enough to reuse existing solutions.

-- Tom