Conversational Blogging, WordPress Can Do It

Those who are deep into blogging realize that this primarily a one way medium. People use it as a mode for self expression and reporting. Even if someone decides to respond they use comments or have to setup their own blog to express their views.

Comments although nifty are very simple methods of offering reactions. Most of the time they are positive or negative reaction to a topic or a fact/fiction within a post. In addition these comments typically get lost in plethora of other comments. They rarely end up being proper conversations between people. Not to mention that some blogs disable comments altogether to prevent spam.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. As an avid blogger and surfer, I comment on many blogs. In the quest for a conversational mode of communication, I also tried CoComment with the hope that I can keep track of my comments across most blogs. However that didn’t quite pan out as I had hoped. It simply captured my comment and aggregated the comment RSS feed for all reactions. It was simple aggregation of comment feeds and not very relevant.

Now I read Fred Wilson’s blog pretty regularly. Interestingly enough he has been dabbling with new comment services and also posted about the one way nature of blogs. Towards the end of the post he says:

But until everyone has a blog, this medium is still going to be pretty one way (me talking to you). That’s why I love comments so much. I want every commenter in the entire blog world to have a single page where all of their comments are captured. Then they’ll all have a blog that I can subscribe to. And it won’t be one way any more.

That is exactly what I want and was hoping from CoComment. I also thought that someone like MyBlogLog would be able to do that. They have one of the largest blogger community base but they haven’t been able to capitalize on that. Anyways I am not going to rant on them.

Just as I was thinking about the need to have conversations and reading Fred Wilson’s post, I also read another piece of news on TechCrunch. Automattic (developers of WordPress and Akismet) purchased Gravatar, a universal blog avatar provider. Its a very basic service where one can upload their avatar image and it will follow the user and place his/her image on the blogs where they comment. Of course the blog should support adding Gravatar identities.

Now in of itself this doesn’t seem close to solving the problem I just spoke of. However combined with WordPress’s comment tracking capabilities, this could be something big. As of now WordPress (WP) does a decent job tracking comments from WP users on any other WP powered site. One can see their comments on the WP Global dashboard page. For example I can look up my comments and follow-ups on GigaOM (a WP based blog I comment frequently on) on the dashboard view. This largely has been a sidelined feature not driving much value.

However leveraging this feature, Gravatar’s identity recognition capabilities and its own blogging capabilities, WordPress can deliver a unique conversational mode of communication. WordPress can deliver features, which Fred Wilson and I are talking about. Here are some of those:

Track Comments

This is built into WP today where it can track user’s comments on other blogs. It is just supported on WP enabled blogs as of now but can be extended to other platforms as well. Actually in my opinion covering WP to begin with would cover a large base as is. WP is the leading platform in the market and every day I hear more bloggers gravitating towards. See the graph on the right from Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.

Feature User Comments as Posts

This is the cool part. WP can enable a feature on their software where it automatically takes the user comments from other blogs and places it as a post on the user’s own blog, web-page or feed. This could be a running log of user’s reactions from all over the web. WordPress can also enable a link to the original post and keep track of follow-ups using the Comment feeds.

Track Replies to Extend Conversations

Instead of mindlessly tracking the whole comment feed, which can get way too noisy in some famous blogs (like Fred’s blog ;-)), WP can use some smart parsing. Most commenters when replying to an opinion use the user’s name submitted on the blog. Most intermediate to advanced users even use a markup style for this by attaching “@” in the beginning of the name of the user who is being addressed during the reply.

WP can leverage these semantics and track only the relevant replies. Of course users should be able to choose to track all comments. These replies can show up as comments on the users blog where his/her original comment was posted as a blog post. Neato!

Typically bloggers have to perform quite a bit of research to generate a post (think of the effort gone in this post alone). Such posts take time and serious commitment. On the other hand services like Twitter support sporadic blast modes of posts containing snippets of information.

“Comment Blogging” or “Conversational Blogging” fits somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t need as much research and thought process or its isn’t just noise, which isn’t be important to anyone. These are genuine reactions and do appropriately convey opinions.

I hope WP can take note of this article and seriously start thinking of this. Let me know what you all think. Unfortunately until WP develops this, you all will have to send in your comments only ;-).

Note: In coming weeks I am hoping to try a new service called disqus in the hopes that it can solve this problem. I will report soon after that.