The Conversational Web

A lot of blog development of late has been directed towards establishing connections between multiple weblogs via mechanisms such as Trackback, Pingback, and friends. Throw in a little RSS and a news aggregator that can tell you where to go to comment on an article. Maybe add a dash of FOAF…. The result is that multiple websites become part of one big conversation.

Well, if it’s a conversation, how about we add a splash of Instant Messaging? Yum. Now we’re cooking!

A couple of days ago, I whipped a quick mod for this site that will notify me via Jabber when a new comment is posted. I’ve got an idea in the back of my brain for setting up a Jabber PubSub component that would let people subscribe themselves to the comments of a particular story. Since not everybody uses Jabber, I figure there will need to be an email notification option, as well. I haven’t had the time to work out the details yet, let alone start any code. Heck, I’ve been typing this entry off-and-on over the last 24+ hours, as it is.

And this is the point where I wish I had already recoded my Trackback implementation to handle autodiscovery and multiple trackbacks.

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