Confusion, annoyance and the search for a better way!

May 23, 2007

This post isn’t about about religion, spirituality, discrimination or searching for meaning. It’s about something that annoys me, and I feel like I’m missing something. It’s about blogging, and writing blog-posts, and the dynamics of commenting and the debate often caused by blogs and also shown within a blog-post. Often I write a post, and someone – usually the person who’s blog I’ve trackbacked - responds because he/she knows that I’ve written something about his/her blog. Sometimes, I comment on another person’s blog because it’s not something I would/could write a post about (i.e. something I wouldn’t trackback for many reasons – one could be, I am just asking a question) and I wouldn’t exactly keep track of the blog that I’ve commented on. I’m sure that others do the same.

When someone responds to these comments that I leave, they usually respond by leaving a comment on their own blog-post straight after the comment left by me. Here are some examples from some of my Transient Spaces buddies – example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5, example 6, and from my own blog. So in these examples, the author of the blog post has responded to comments left by others by commenting on thier own blog. Some responses are just acknowledgements of a comment left (“thank you for your support”), others are comments from the author that are seeking a response from someone who left a comment about thier post (“you don’t make any sense. learn how to write”), and some of the comments by the authors are questions (could be saying “what do you mean when you said blah blah blah“). The example from my own blog shows that I trackbacked, and that author responded to my blog post, then I responded, then he responded and so on. Now he must have been checking my blog for a reply (I assume) so he could respond to my comments and thus we had a conversation, however he was not notified that I was responding to him. Some of the other examples show comments from the author of the blog-post in response to a comment, and these responses never got responded to by the original writer of the comment (not the blog author). 

I feel like I’m confusing myself and others.

So, I mean Writer A writes the blog post;
Writer B responds with a comment;
Writer A replies to that comment with a comment;
and then Writer B never responds because he/she isn’t aware of the response by Writer A.

Personally, I had the author of something I trackbacked, comment on my post. There have been replies to that person, however that person doesn’t know that people are asking him questions and so on. If I reply to that comment myself (on my own blog post) I don’t think the author of the original comment will ever respond because he or she does not know that I have responded - and I doubt that person will keep checking my one blog-post to see if someone has indeed responded.

So what’s the solution? I was thinking of just replying by making a comment on his blog, but it makes almost no sense to readers there unless they read the comment left by that author on my post. ‘That solution isn’t even open to me if the person who commented on my blog doesn’t notify me of their blog, or if it isn’t a comment by someone I have trackbacked. Trackbacking all the time to form a conversation would not illustrate the debate clearly. Should there be a system, that if you leave a comment and someone responds to it, it should notify you by email? Is there another way to do it? Otherwise it’s hard to form a debate. What’s the best way to make life easier to form a debate like this? Do we just make sure we re-read the blogs we comment on – I mean RSS feeds don’t even notify us of comments on another blog do they?

Now that I’ve written about it, this problem doesn’t even seem worth talking about, but I feel like I’m missing something, and I want a better way!