Last night, (after helping strip the bloatware off my sister-in-laws computer and getting her WEP key), i read an article from Richard McManus about getting some of the yahoo! firehose. In said article, he raises an interesting point.
One of the things he noted was that traffic he got from buzz, left comments on his blog. He noted that experience was different from other aggregators (digg, reddit, slashdot, etc.) because those other services grow comments on those sites. It's an interesting quandary, really. Quite often, a page submitted to a big aggregation site doesn't have the ability to harbor discussion so frequent users simply leave comments on the aggregation site. (one also supposes that large aggregation sites probably want to encourage that behavior since they can monetize those comment sites). For blogs, however, a valuable part of the general discussion is missing.
This is something that Jeremy once noted about Friendfeed, since one can comment there but there's no way to enjoin that discussion with comments from the blog. It's as if there's groups of folks at conference gathered together like a cocktail party rather than a forum. Sure, there's some benefit from that sort of interaction, but ultimately, there's also a failure for information to be fully shared.
What complicates matters even more is that often these aggregation sites don't notify a given site the fact that there's aggregation occurring for it. (Or that there are multiple aggregations occurring as various folks add the site to their stream. For example, if Jeremy and i both add this post to our respective FriendFeeds, people on that service can comment to Jeremy's link or my link but can be blissfully unaware that both of us have links.)
It just seems to me that there's a failure in the way that these services operate. There should be some sort of open way for these services to notify the origin site of links, as well as some way to collate the individual links into potentially centralized discussions. Sure, there's a rich venue for abuse as spammers either link to everything or create their own "aggregation" sites they load with ads, but hell, they do that now. i'd just whitelist the sort of trackback links that i display to be sets of known, trusted services, possibly even double layered to be known, trusted individuals using those services. (e.g. filter through FOAF via MyBlogLog or something to establish levels of trusted relationships.)
This is totally do-able.
Now, to figure out how to get another 8 hours squeezed into my 32 hour day so i can build something like that.
Number four on the list of alternative terms for a romantic night with Jerry Yang - "Getting some of the Yahoo! firehose".
Thanks JIM. I know the #18 is "Hide the search result". 2 more and I get the full collection of terms.
(and possibly a severance package)
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Personally, I think Third Voice is a good website link discussion mechanism. Well, except that they're no longer in business.
Basically, it kept the comments on the site - any site - without using the site's commenting system. Further, the comments were invisible if you didn't know about Third Voice.
A better system would be if the Third Voice replacement could not only thread discussions, but also have the option for the comments to be hidden unless you followed onto the page from a very specific link.
This would be fantastic, allowing the individual linking communities to have a good forum, directly on the page w/o having to go back to their lame hang-out, while at the same time allowing us to avoid, say, the Digg crowd's comments while still seeing the uh.net crowd's. Or whatever.
Of course, it would destroy page impressions for the linking site, but whatever. If your business model depends on annoying and corralling people, it's time to think about a world of providing real value.