Responding to an article in Slate about Newsmashing, Alan Taylor wrote a post entitled “newsmashing with delicious” talking about the possibility of annotating web pages by posting comments in del.icio.us’ ‘extended’ field. These annotations could then be retrieved by any visitor to the site using a bookmarklet that will retrieve the del.icio.us entries for a given URL.

As someone points out in the comments on that post, there is some resemblance between this and the ‘technorati this’ bookmarklet that lets you quickly find incoming links to a given URL. Unlike technorati, this method makes it easy to quickly comment on a URL without having to make use of your own site. (and you can of course then retrieve your del.icio.us RSS feed and use it on your site). While this doesn’t allow the precision annotations of individual page elements discussed in the original Slate piece, it could well be an interesting tool.

It rather feels as though ways of interacting with others’ pages are becoming a key area of conversation, whether that be this discussion or recent talk about the future (or death of) trackback. Even where it comes to blogs that allow comments directly on the page, there are still many advantages to being able to make your comments through a service that provides you with ongoing control of your content, even if there is the problem that has been raised in online fora for some time that we are not used to conversations where participants can easily change the public record of their contributions.

For the author of an article, on the other hand, is is far more convenient to be able to assemble all comments (or at least records of comments) in one place, rather than having to employ a multitude of searches to discover the general response to what you’ve been saying. Technorati’s ability to search for partial matches and to provide a feed of the results allows me to keep track of all links to jystewart.net that they monitor, no matter how deep that link might be. Del.icio.us has yet to develop that functionality and it would be extremely time consuming to check on each individual piece that I write.

Perhaps what is needed is a tool that can be easily employed to monitor the various commenting services and to aggregate the data found. With a clean API, new services could be added as they appear and simplicity could be maintained. (there is, of course, the ongoing spam issue…). Such a tool could then be integrated with the conversation models I described in this post?

Perhaps I need to eke out some time to work on such things….

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Yesterday, Tom Coates posted a piece entitled “Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too?” His argument is that trackback spam has put an end to an interesting attempt to knit together posts between different blogs, that we should allow time for mourning, but we should also begin looking for alternatives. The Six Apart Pronet list has carried a number of posts from people agreeing with his analysis.

Trackback never really took off outside of techie circles. The lack of support for it in blogger and the lack of education of new bloggers as to its advantages ensured that. For those of us who are interested in the technical aspects of blogging, and in the potential it offers to change the way we have conversations, it was a great starting point, but it never hit the primetime.

I wonder whether the lack of visual integration based on trackbacks may also have held it back. Reading comments on blogs is a linear process that requires little mental adjustment, but since trackback content rarely extends beyond excerpts, truly following a conversation requires a deep adoption of hypertext reading skills that may not have yet reached critical mass.

The enthusiasm with which people greet technorati’s cosmos when they see it, and the number of bloggers who don’t use trackbacks but who display a technorati profile on their site may be evidence that simpler tools encourage participation, but that could equally just be the ego-stroking possibilities that blog rankings allow. Some people have suggested making use of tags to follow conversations, but I fear that the imprecision would not make for a smooth flow, and the namespace could quickly become very cluttered.

On the technical side, with the Atom Syndication Format approaching stability I wonder whether this may be a good time to consider the possibilities the use of Atom as both Syndication Format and Publishing Protocol offer for a trackback replacement. A couple of years ago, Tim Appnel posted some thoughts on the next generation of trackback and a number of them could be combined with an extended Atom API.

A new form trackback could consist of an atom entry, posted to a given URI, with the recipient following the conventions of the Atom Protocol (and HTTP) to respond. The receiving interface, having access to the full entry, could apply logic to the entry to ensure it wasn’t spam.

The receiving URI could then build up a representation of the conversation as a feed, perhaps with extenstions to represent the flow of the conversation, and tools could display that linearly, threaded, or however seemed most appropriate. Smart clients could spider out from that representation to see if there were other elements that had been missed, aided by the universal uniqueness of entry IDs.

Offering clear ‘conversation views’ it may be easier to evangelise on behalf of this new tool, and by building on top of an existing API the overheads for tool support would be reduced.

What is most clearly missing from this approach is a way to reduce the spam load. More data allows for more sophisticated filtering, but as noted above it increases processing overheads. It may be that the WSSE authentication used within Atom could be used, along with a key included in the entry being commented on, to require the client sending the ‘trackback’ to identify itself, but I suspect this one is going to require further thought.

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I’ve been meaning to add some sort of comment support on UN Charter.org for a while now and the joint motivations of the site being mentioned in an ETech presentation this month and the emergence of a trackback module in PEAR has encouraged me to give it a try. The integration so far is very simple, but each article should now contain autodiscovery code and trackbacks that have been received will be listed.

Making changes to the uncharter code reminded me of how much more work it needs. Eventually the whole site will be moving to a new platform but in the meantime I’m hoping to clean up the RDF in each page, refactor the codebase and perhaps add in some technorati-related features. More news on that whenever I get to it…

UPDATE: Tobias Schlitt, the man hehind PEAR::Services_Trackback has blogged about the module.

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