Today's essay by Ray Ozzie has led me to his personal blog.
In an excellent note called Architecture Matters: The Rebirth of Public Discussion he argues that blog design pattern naturally solves the signal-to-noise problem of other means of online communication such as newsgroups and other similar services. This note has led me to thinking about "blog design pattern":
While I'm facinated by the phenomenon of weblogs I currently see a few little bit of an issue with blog design. In order to conduct an effective and fruiful dialog online, all parties have to be notified when a reply to the original post has become available. That's the basis of opration of mailing list, newsgroups and other 'conventional' methods of online communication. When a conversation is spread across many different blogs, it is difficult to see how a constructive conversation can be conducted when an author isn't notified that someone is replying to his or her post. It would not terribly difficult to build tools to solve this issue, but I'm not aware of any existing today.
Secondly, vast majority of blogs are personal. And a persone usually has to deside which ones to follow. This consequence of blog design pattern can easily lead to ideas being burried within a closed circle of friends.