throwing technology at blog reading issues

[piranha]

today we have the reorganization of my flist. i removed almost all syndicated feeds. i friended some people back who actually write in their LJs, whom i recognize from somewhere, and who apparently had friended me already (i do not pay attention to that unless somebody comments). if you don't write in your LJ, i didn't friend you -- but i don't make locked posts except for downloads (and i am going to handle that differently), so it doesn't matter. i also made several new friends filters.

for the longest time i've been insisting that my friends list is my reading list; that i read everyone who is on it, every day that i actually read my flist. which used to be every day, period, and then became "every few days for as long as i can easily page backward", then "once every two weeks, kinda", and lastly "once in a blue moon", which is what spurred me on to doing this, since i am obviously not coping well enough with the size of the list. i already had separate filters for reading comms, that's easy. but i never knew how to sort people reasonably well into filters, because aside from my partners and closest friends, i don't really have preferences that stay the same for any period of time. i just did a really rough triage, into snigglers (since we're all being particularly active in talking to each other), alt.polyfolk, PLATOnics, writers, fellow smutters/scanlators, and "other". it really makes no emotional sense to filter people like that, but it's the only thing i can think of that results in several manageable lists.

furthermore, i have so far been reading RSS feeds from half a gazillion blogs through LJ's flist, which functions as a handy aggregator. but LJ's flist isn't actually a particularly good aggregator and has been stuck in this sorry state for years; after the initial addition of syndication LJ hasn't done anything with it, not even to fix the totally annoying commenting issue (the one where one is allowed to comment on LJ to a feed, but that doesn't actually go TO the feed, it just stores the comment in the LJ account, which means most feeders will never ever see it). in the meantime actual RSS readers have improved, and my usenet newsreader (gnus) can also read RSS feeds. so i am shifting all my feed reading to a dedicated reader -- gotta try out a few different ones, with special attention to how they handle comments and commenting. because i would really like to be able to keep better track of when i comment out there; i often don't go back and check for a response, and in general don't comment much at all because it feels too "drive-by".

part of why i don't comment is the annoyance of having to fill in my personal information for each damn blog, or to actually create an account on their system. therefore i'm also looking into cross-blog identification schemes such as openID, which means i'd just need to log in once for a whole slew of blogs. unfortunately not every blogging/forum system has that enabled, but we'll see what shakes out.

Comments

[ckd]

What platform are you on? I really like NetNewsWire on the Mac as an RSS reader.

NetNewsWire

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

mac. yeah, i've got that one on top of my list. if you can elaborate (after FP i imagine), can you say why you really like it?

[crystlyte.livejournal.com]

Thanks for keeping us posted on your investigations. OpenID sounds interesting.

[selki.livejournal.com]

There have been security concerns listed with regard to OpenID, but I don't know much more than that, so far.

More and more, I'm routing feeds through Google Reader rather than LJ (other aggregators might be better, that was just an easy one for me to start reading). I would so love an RSS feed reader feature that would notify me if an entry I'd commented on had gotten new comments.

[daev.livejournal.com]

I think this is a wise idea.

I was talking with a friend who complained about LJ's total lack of a sequencer, or even a mechanism like on most other web-communities which puts the most recently commented post at the top.

"For how long do LiveJournal users keep commenting on an active post?" he asked.

"For as long as it stays on the first page of their Friends view," I answered.

"And how long is that?"

"It depends entirely on how many active users, communities, and feeds they've friended..." at which point I realized this was an incredibly strong argument for viciously paring down my Friends List.

Having a busy Friends List kills community-building. Take all those blog feeds somewhere else: an RSS aggregator, or just a Friends Filter. Shorter is better.

[flarenut.livejournal.com]

Wow. Choice between a large friends list and community-building. There so has to be a better way.

some choice

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah. i mean, i am not even here for community building, and while i am reading a large number of comms at times, i am an active member in only very few, and a member who actually helps build in exactly two. but there definitely are better ways.

standard forum software (like vbulletin, smf, phpbb) does this aspect better than LJ. but it's missing the alt.fan.me.me.me component, which LJ has to the nines, and which is actually cool too.

flist vs community building

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

community building is not actually my focus here. even if it were, a smaller flist wouldn't help with that, unless i reduce it to something like 10 people, and that then flies right in the face of community building in general. and i am interested in rather more people than that. :) i use the flist to keep track of individuals, not to build community in their journals. in fact, i resist doing that, and find myself annoyed with people who try to get people to always comment in their journals a la "and how was your day?" (if you want to know, read my journal, will you?) -- all those miniature fiefdoms only serve to fracture interesting discussions into a zillion merely semi-interesting pieces.

even if a post stayed longer on the first page, i wouldn't be more inclined to continue commenting on it because just by looking i can't tell whether there are new comments and by whom. i mean, i can, but memory suffices only for a very limited number of posts. i can use the subscription feature, which at least serves me all the new comments (without their context, mind, unless i am reading then in email). but that gets unwieldy very quickly; i usually try to not track more than 5 active threads. when a thread gets very active, it swamps everything else. the interface to manage subscriptions sucks.

for community building i would prefer to have a separate but closely associated forum system where interesting discussions can be more easily kept track of than by trawling the comment section of each individual journal. and where they're not "owned" by anyone. though i kinda like some degree of access control, because sometimes one wants to take it more public than one's own journal, but not to the entire world.

separate but associated forum

[flarenut.livejournal.com]

Once the data is there, you should be able to slice it however you want. So the forum version is just another view. Depending on how much you wanted to automate and how much you wanted to shove onto the user, the groupings could be done by hand or semi-automagically (say by tags).

Hmm, I kinda like that -- might lead to some interesting serendipity.

Re: separate but associated forum

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yes, indeed. i haven't entirely wrapped my head around that paradigm, but it is what makes drupal so attractive to me, and what makes it different from other content management systems i've looked at. at its heart lies not some structure you define ahead of time, but taxonomy applied to whatever content you enter. content can then be viewed in any number of structures you define afterwards.

the main trick becomes to get people to apply good tags. :)