One-Way Weblogs
I love Weblogs. They are a great way for ordinary folk to publish their thoughts and ideas and experiences to the Web without getting involved in a lot of technical folderol.
But I wonder if ultimately we aren't going to want to declare on some level that a Weblog without a discussion feature is somewhat less rich than it might otherwise be? I'm not singling out any product here. Lots of the Weblog products I looked at over the past few weeks as I was searching for a solution for a colleague lacked that feature. I was intrigued at its omission until I realized that a Weblog really is a one-way, one-to-many broadcast medium.
That's cool. I'm finding uses for it, obviously. And I think that not having to deal with discussions as an integral part of the process fulfills a desire of Userland and other folks who are working in this space to avoid complexity in the out-of-the-box experience. I applaud that desire.
I'm just thinking in terms of the longer view. What role should discussion (or some other community-feedback mechanism) play in this phenomenon? I have a theory, which I'll expound in an article here later today if I can find the cycles, about the Web being a many-to-many model, that that is in fact what makes this a unique medium (along with a few other features, of course).
See? I wish there were a way for me to open this up to discussion so you could tell me how wrong I am! :-)
10:22:43 AM 
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