I don’t really like the format of a blog.

As frequent readers of this blog know, Jeremy would love if more people were active in the comments (even if says he doesn’t care anymore). I too agree that more discussion on the topics we can only so much write about would be welcome. I don’t learn much by writing and telling, but I believe that there is much to learn from a good discussion. In this way this blog is not enough forum-y. Is there a platform that could balance community and content?

The length of a blog piece and it’s nature of being defined in time are also problematic. No-one’s going to read a blog post that’s too long, yet we can’t just write “I find this site interesting” and put a link. Yet, this is how we communicate in Reddit, del.icio.us, IM and sometimes in e-mail. Unfortunately none of the mentioned (besides Reddit, but that’s public and not private link-sharing) give any opportunity to expand your ideas or get commentary (except e-mail and IM, but that’s too private). Forums on the other hand would give us a place for discussion, but the format doesn’t is hard to publish to. More forum-like approaches in my opinion are Worse than Failure and in some sense, Slashdot. Unfortunately, as readers of these two sites know, the discussion are rarely intellectually stimulating.

Commentary on blogs is hard, one main reason is poor design. I think the default WordPress templates actually discourage commentary. Blogger goes to extremes as it likes to separate discussion into a pop-up window. There are some blogs that have been designed with comments in mind and give good space to them, but commeting still sucks. It’s really difficult to engage in a discussion in a blog’s comments and I don’t believe I’m the only one who thinks so.

I’ve noticed that Jeremy has added his del.icio.us links to the sidebar, and in fact, we have been trying to share links using del.icio.us for a while. It is amazing that this “social bookmarking” doesn’t actually seem to suit our needs. Unless we used a special tag in each of our links (which is kind of a hack), it’s almost impossible to link to a group’s links. I can view my network, but my links aren’t there. I can’t even find a way to follow my network’s tags like I can either mine or everyone’s (ie del.icio.us/network/zyx/webcomics in this case). The only way, devised by Vincent, is to create a dummy-account and add everyone to its network.

Then there are the other ways to mini-blog (or is it called microblogging?). Most people associate this with twitter, which in my mind is starting to look more and more like a successful and simple hack. Maybe the idea is in the simplicity. Also, it seems the major talking point about twitter is about the fact that it’s developed using Ruby on Rails (for better or worse).

In my opinion, there are two really good competitors, both which have a killer feature, that unfortunately hasn’t been developed fully. Both Jaiku (which I already mentioned as a formidable opponent to Twitter in a previous post) and Tumblr give you the option to import your “life-feeds” into them. By “life-feeds” I mean your photos in Flickr, your tracks at last.fm, your wines at cork’d, your saved links in reddit, etc. I’ve tried to give a shot at both these tools (see mu jaiku and my tumblr blogs), but even they don’t fulfill my need to express myself completely. In Tumblr the shortcoming is you can’t comment on someone’s entry, buth at Jaiku they’ve thought this out, which in my opinion is another killer feature. There’s still a lot of promise in Tumblr and Jaiku. At least I hope so. They might not be the platform I’m looking for, but that doesn’t really matter as I can always integrate the content in these aggreagated life-feeds into whatever finally feels right as, naturally, you can export their data as RSS.

Lately some people in this blog have argued that XHTML, AJAX and XML are the cornerstones of Web 2.0. I still believe it’s actually RSS. Granted, it’s XML, but its the killer application, the open format was just an enabler and catalyst for its adoption. (In other sidenote, XHTML was a mistake and what we call AJAX was actually just a revelation that all modern browsers have a mature JavaScript support, and XML is way too generic in general sense.)

Anyway, what are your development ideas for blogging, revision 2? Mine is more engaging commentary, or actually, more engaging discussion. I think the first mistake is calling those things below these posts just “comments”. They should and could be so much more.

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I’m very impressed with what IBM Research Lab based in Haifa, Israel, just came out with: an Ajax-powered web app that allows non developers to build form services.

I’ve been playing with IBM Development Engagement Service (lousy name though) and indeed, built in 3 simple & natural steps:

1. Name your application and describe it (max. 3 minutes)
2. Create a form definition (max. 45 minutes)
3. Publish the newly created application (max. 2 minutes)

Even dummies are able to publish web forms in less than an hour.

Remember, I was talking a few days ago about PopFly – a killer web app made by Microsoft to empower non developers with a tool to help them devise their own mash ups.

Now it’s IBM’s turn. And I can assure you one can tell the elephant can dance indeed. To give IBM DevEngage a go – which I highly recommend, click here.

It’s late and I’m too tired to write a short analysis about software giants (IBM is second to Microsoft on the software market) putting on efforts to become more agile against the new competition from the web (mainly Web 2.0 consumer apps & enterprise SaaS). But I’m sure you’ll do it in the comment section of this post. Enjoy the discussion!

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