My hyperactive brain has been whirring around the problems of the hyperlink gymnastics required to navigate our communications here, AKA: our blog is too hard to read, or too hard to follow. Yes, I put up my hand, I have been the culprit of many a post-jumping dialogue, ramble and generally confusing comment spams.
I had a bit of a surf around the pixel-sphere and would like to report that it is a very common problem on blogs, chatrooms, and in open comment forums etc.
There seems to be whole R&D departments devoting themselves slavishly to the development of conversation smart software, (in other news, Cuba is dumping Microsoft in favour of the open-source operating system Linux), but I digress – and this seems to be one of my main problems!!!! A perfectly wonderful way to be conversational but one of the reasons that our TACblog conversations seem to be fizzling out somewhat.
Me and my search-engine have come up with a whole heap of things we could do to make things easier for ourselves and potential other silent browsers (hi mum ;)
To Post or to Comment on a Post? – why don’t we reserve posts for new topics of conversation, subjects or news OR summaries of older conversations.
One subject postings – if we have something to introduce for discussion, then how about boiling it down to its essential elements and posting it as one subject.
Feed your post – when you make a posting, keep it alive by tracking the discussion, responding to comments and summarising ideas as they develop.
Bestow Titles – use them in your posts and comments to draw attention to the focus and type of your communication. Some examples: brilliant new idea, supporting idea, counter-idea, supporting example, counter-example, extrapolation, summary, reminds me that, catch-up, ramble, problem, solution*.
Subject Labels – Surely they were invented to make blog trawling clearer and more interesting. I suggest you look to the right side for labels that already exist, otherwise make up a relevant new label and begin to add these automatically when you make a post
Images – We’re all aesthetes after all, lets keep our neck of web-land pretty!
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6 comments:
yes let's
subject labels rock my world. i really should have paid attention to this sooner :)
a suggestion from a lurker ...
why don't you consider moving long term discussions over to a wiki? Wetpaint - http://www.wetpaint.com/ - offer really simple, aesthetically pleasant, completely free wiki-hosting.
then your blog could be for talking to each other (and lurkers) while the wiki could be used to maintain all your 'admin' - a page for each project, for example, or a 'random ideas' page, or a 'finance' page ...
thanks for the tip, a wiki sounds like a great idea to me.
Tom - you should check out "the lurkers" way with subject labels!
I just made a subject label called "conversations underway", which i have labeled all our current conversational posts with. Try clicking on it for a quick way to keep up with what's happening, esp if you haven't visited the blog for a while.
All sounds good....gonna check out the conversations underway thing too. Thanks Liz X
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