(2002-03-12) e

Jonathan Peterson emailed me, wondering when a single tool might handle all his WebLog (and long-essay) writing, Blog Thread following, BookMark tracking, and other BlogWeb needs. I suspect:

• everyone's going to have personal tastes on how to deal with Reading And Writing all this stuff - the broader the mix of actions/datatypes, the more those tastes will differ

• this will lead to a mix of (a) ongoing diversity of tools to pick from (similar to the PIM market), and (b) a small obsessive group continuing to use multiple tools to support different needs.

• blogthreading doesn't interest a sufficiently huge number of people yet to expect anyone to build such a tool, except those monomaniacal enough to do so for their own needs (which means it's eventually inevitable but hard to plan for). In the meantime it might be a good idea for any Blog Thread participant or lurker to maintain a simple summary of links; I'll bet many of the participants would link to that story often in the course of adding new postings.

• blogthreading could be supported by a central service or by a user-controlled reading tool; the latter seems more likely

• to deal with scaling the availability of old RSS entries (to trace back through an old thread), individual blog-servers will probably need to be able to generate an RSS (or other XML) view of any past item. (I'm pretty sure most engines just think in terms of a single most-recent RSS per channel.)

• a number of tools might be worth building such features with: TinderBox, PythonCard, Radio Userland, Zope, etc.