Looks like I didn't quite install Intense Debate correctly. Disqus seems to have much of functionality needed, oh except that it's a hosted solution. This doth not work for a corporate or government network.
It's a very cool web tool and allows comment tracking via RSS for both thread and user. I do wonder about the benefit of tracking people by user - I'm already doing that elsewhere. Unless I got heavily involved in commenting on blogs, the value for me of tracking someone's activities on another platform are pretty low. Integrated into FriendFeed and maybe we're talking, but that's another mess of activity reporting overload.
Interesting that Y Combinator is one of the investors behind Disqus. Guess they think it's got quite a bit of potential.
Wanted: an app that will provide comment functionality across other apps, e.g. different blogs, web based document management, wiki, and allow comment feeds by resource or user. The benefit of this on the open web seems somewhat minimal to me, but it would be really useful on an intranet.
I started building a small prototype using Google App Engine, but I don't think any solution to this problem would be any sort of huge technological leap. Nothing more than a persistent user-based comment system.
Some guy named Jerry Bowles commented today, in a harsh affront to African Gray parrots everywhere, that "Twittering is for Birdbrains." Bowles starts,
May I share a secret with you? I really don't care what you're doing. I don't care that Jason has quit blogging, or that Chris is hyping yet another dreary marketing conference where the usual dreary suspects gather for the usual dreary presentations (to which, of course, they pay no attention because they are busy Twittering). I know we all need some sort of excuse for work and/or spousal avoidance but come on people, really.
And he ends with,
What I do care about is ideas and the power of the written word to change the world for the good. There are only a handful of people on the planet who can say something worthwhile in 140 characters. The chances are good that you're not one of them.
Get over yourself.
Touche.
Maybe this was one of those tongue-in-cheek missives to which so many curmudgeonly bloggers are prone. But I think not. Jerry really doesn't like Twitter. He doesn't want to hear that you're late for your meeting. Then again, Jerry doesn't have a limping clue how to use Twitter.
The problem
Yes, most of the content is prattle. If it isn't some asinine detail from someone's life (see the video below), it's non-stop Navel Gazing 2.0 bullshit. But most of the content isn't for you. Just because it's accessible by you doesn't mean it's addressable to you. That's the little conceptual trip wire that seems to give so many people problems with open content models in the web 2.0 model.
The solution
So what do you do about? You turn it off. You listen only to the people who have something valuable to say, or something relevant to say. Because when my coworker posts on Twitter that he's late for a meeting, everyone else following his feed knows that. He didn't need to send out an email, he didn't need to call everyone, he just posts and it's done. If you don't care you - well I can barely bring myself to say this - you ignore it. An intuitive transition from instant messaging
For people who grew up with instant messaging it's normal to mix your life online and in real life (IRL, meat space, whatever). If you're chatting with someone online you don't just leave, you say goodbye, tell them you're out. If you're chatting with a bunch of people you might just put a hasty away message instead of responding to every open window. And if you're going to be away for a while you'll leave up an away message for the person who wanted to talk, so they know whether to bother expecting a response.
In the college days, and I doubt much has changed expect for a heavier reliance on Facebook, you'd include in your away message where you were, where you'd be next, when you'd be back, or where you were going for the night. It's a passive way of letting your friends know how to meet up with you when you're away from your computer and you can't contact every single one. It's a way of anticipating chance interest in what you're doing or where you are.
And so it is with Twitter. Some people use the platform for informative microblogging, others for situational awareness, some just to vent, still others to rate every song played on Pandora for their friends. Or something else. When you get to an open platform with everyone's content available you have to do the same thing you do at the grocery store confronted with 20 brands of pasta sauce - choose.
It's really an old story now. Newspaper circulation is dropping and it's dropping fast. There are various and good reasons why this is the case. But they call come down to one thing.
Newspapers - and their core audiences - got hung up on the means and forgot about the end.
There's something enjoyable about paging through a well-written newspaper over a late breakfast, this much I grant. But if what you want is to know what is going on in the world, to gauge the opinion of others, to hear salacious gossip about people you've never met - well then those are your ends, and the newspaper need be the medium no more than a train need be the means to travel between New York and Washington.
We let our irrational fixation on the means steer us away from what really matters. This is the core problem people face with small innovations and advancements.
The story starts, I think, with the typewriter. Invented much earlier, the typewriter made its real appearance in the 19th Century. The machine had one purpose, to enable people to type up documents. Straightforward enough. The mechanical typewriter went through iterations of mechanical development before the appearance of the electric typewriter, courtesy of IBM.
Then in the whiz-bang 1970's the now defunct Wang Laboratories introduced what was really the first word processor. Think electronic typewriter with memory. These evolved through the years - I remember one in my dad's office at one point - but were eventually displaced by the PC. The PC could load a word processing application and connect to a printer and emulate what the single purpose word processor could do, plus a whole lot more.
So we get the PC with the software word processor with which we can create and edit and print documents (oh yes, I remember using Word Perfect on DOS when Word Perfect was an independent company!). As email began to percolate into the workplace it became a way to exchange word processor documents between coworkers; no more printing and exchanging documents and memos before the final draft.
But the problem is that this stream of innovations is entirely concerned with documents. The report that was moved from the typewriter to the hardware word processor to the software word processor was moved about as a document. Each advance was designed to do better what the previous iteration did. But the document doesn't matter. As paper it's a physical means to an abstract end, the advance of ideas, the exchange of information.
This is surely no big deal, but it highlights the problem that we all - that everyone - faces with new technology. We get hung up on the means and all too often the metaphor (file folders, really?) and lose sight of the purpose. That idea doesn't need to be communicated in a document. It can be written up in a blog or a wiki. That message can be sent via email or IM or microblog. We get stuck on the last iteration of our attempt to solve the problem, and forget about the actual problem we were trying to solve in the first place.
Don't believe me?
Do you have a large storage space at the back of your car? (or worse yet, inoperable protective coverings nailed next to your windows?)
