possibilidades de interação em weblogs

O texto abaixo surgiu a partir de uma discussão sobre possibilidades de fundir comentários e fórum usando o Movable Type - algo semelhante ao que está rolando no nosso BB sobre como integrar as ferramentas disponíveis de modo a proporcionar uma maior interação entre leitores e autores de uma comunidade de blogs. Postado na correria, por isso a língua estrangeira.

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I completely agree with Roger when he states that "Community is my priority, and community is dependent upon a sense of place. Your blog, Sam Ruby's blog, a cluster of blogs, a discussion forum, whatever... the members of a community need a central, shared experience that binds them together."

Running a weblog community in southern Brazil (www.insanus.org), I find that centralizing this experience is quite a challenge, but essential for enhancing interaction. Through available tools, we can get a certain amount of this on a certain level, but none seem to do the job as a whole.

Track backs are great for author-author interactions (apart from the fact that they aren't actual bidirectional links). As stated by many above, the use of the track back tool fragments the discussion into a much greater realm, which is good for publicizing and 'spreading the word', but not so for maintaining community around a certain group of weblogs.

A more direct user level is found in comments and in forums, the later having advantage for the fact that it can aggregate the discussions of the whole community. Never the less, comments are still the preferred medium because of its practical application. On the click of a button, readers can add comments, hence making it a simple and fast way to build up interaction.

But comments are volatile, and just as quick as one can add his or her point of view, this discussion is lost, usually relegated to the archives page. This being, it becomes quite hard to follow interesting discussions, and in weblogs with a large post per day average, it becomes even harder.

While in forums we don't have such problem, the crude and cumbersome interface that populate BBs currently available are a great drawback. I feel that users of weblog communities don't seem compelled to use forums because of its lack of simplicity and for usually not being seamlessly integrated with the rest of the blogs' structure. A discussion forum usually stands as something apart and distant.

So then I find this blog/forum structure created by Mark, which is great I would say, but then again lacks something important which 'normal' forums have, and this is the ability for users/readers/interacting agents to create their own topics. I believe this to be essential if our goal is to create a community; overcome usual weblog hierarchy, where reader comments are usually left to a small pop-up window.

I write all this not knowing after all what would be our option, and thus asking you guys to chip in and give your view on these aspects. We have some great tools out there, serving one or another specific role in interaction. How to integrate these I believe is the key into ideal weblog communities.

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Tracking back from Web Dawn & Six Apart ProNet

Ilustração novamente surrupiada da Carson Ellis