A small note in David Larlet's thoughts says he is frustrated about not having interactions in his thoughts. Christian Fauré made a comment on twitter about:
- Writing in French instead of English.
- Having the possibility for comments.
I started to write a tweet for answering to Christian and David and thought, Twitter is not the right place. But I still have a stream of thoughts that I could share. Usenet was quite practical for this in the past. Very handy for sharing thoughts and discussing at the same time without any approval… until the first spam on Usenet, but I digress or more exactly it is too early for this arguement.
A long time ago I decided to write in French on my blog. I do not care about the language. Two motivations, I was writing in the language I was more comfortable with at the time AND I was talking about technology which I thought needed to permeate in the French community. The English speaking world had a lot of resources. The thoughts of David in French or in English is not an issue, et quelqu'un pourrait répondre en français sur un billet en anglais.
I'm usually not in favor with commenting systems. They do not bring value, even if I'm using them more often than I should at other people's blogs. The value of a commenting system is the system which keeps the discussions alive. It is not the fact to bring in thoughts of someone else on my own thoughts, but to share this thoughts in a group of people. I'm subscribed to David's Thoughts. All the people who are subscribed are persons interested by him and what he has to say. We create a community. The frustration for David is not about a random person commenting but about having an interaction with the community.
For this interaction to exist, you need the infrastructure to let the message to come in (commenting system for example) BUT you need the infrastructure to let the message be shared in the community (often a commenting RSS feed). This redistribution of comments is the interesting and lively part of it. Without it, there is no community discussion (decentralized interactions).
EMBRUNS: We can note that technically the interactions are done with different technical means. In the case of Embruns for example.
- Blog Post creation: HTTP POST
- Blog Post distribution: HTTP GET on feed or web page
- Comment creation: HTTP POST
- Comment distribution: HTTP GET on blog post Web page or on Comments feed
FOGO: Another case of interactions Gerald Oskoboiny (which is mostly dead now because Gerald doesn't post anymore but it's fine). Gerald created FOGO which means Friends of Gerald Oskoboiny. This is a mailing list for people who want to share things together. It seems it stopped maintaining it, but during the time it was maintained the thoughts of gerald and is community were archived on the Web. So people could interact through mails knowing that their thoughts would be publicly archived. The interaction is really multi-directional because every thoughts is being shared again with the rest of the community.
There are a few issues with archiving mailing-lists on the Web. Most of the systems show individual pages for messages and not really the flow of the discussions on 1 Web page. Maybe there should be a page for one thread. Another issue is people do not know how to use their mail software (top posting, replying instead of creating a new thread, etc.)
Another system of "Thoughts machine" (can't find anymore where it was) but the combination of post and commenting system as a wiki. The thought is the initial starter of the discussion and then the commenting-wiki is a zone where people will build an argumentation for creating something which pushes further the discussion. This will not work in an open environment and requires people who are willing to abandon the ownership on their own thoughts for the good of the community (harder for some people).
There are certainly more things to say.
This is under CC0
Path for this blurb of text:
Reading Christian's comment on Twitter about David's Thoughts → Writing here on a gist my initial thoughts → "broadcasting" to david and christian on Twitter. (and adding this comment)