A while back Stowe Boyd and I were bouncing some ideas around about automatic discussion thread aggregation [during which Stowe coined the phrase "duelling blogs" in a side remark in one posting] , and I had taken a break from the stream while updating my blogging tools: you can geat a feel for the ebb and flow from these entries by tracing through some or all of the following [note that the pain of doing such detective work is precisely what we're trying to ease]:

Stowe [Plazes + Gush]
  Marc [comments on how hard to do threading in blogs]
    Stowe [proposes 'Threadorati']
      Marc [feels we've got a long way to go]
        Stowe [proposes 'Chaterati']
          Marc [proposes break while upgrading own tools]

Feeling just about ready to dive back in, I’ve started playing with Bertrand Sereno’s semantic blogging conversation tracker, still at a very early experimental stage. The idea is to add a layer of annotation above a simle trackback, so that it would eventually become easier to track things like pro/con arguments, or generally the ebb and flow of discussions that were most emphatically not posted as threads in a discussion forum, but rather in disparate blog entries. What better testbed than the “Marc (Canter) Heresy I, II, III, IV, and V” postings and rebuttals between Stowe and Marc C?

The problem I immediately came up against is that in a form-filling tool, as it exists right now, I soon suffered from cognitive overload, after just a short number links. What I wanted to do was sketch out a little diagram, and indeed I needed the diagram not only to organize my thinking but also to convey my feature-wish-list to Bertrand. Here’s the quick sketch I made:

The big red dots/blobs are merely my way of flagging to Bertrand that I did indeed ‘get that far’ using the form-filling approach, before my brain cells overloaded. Too many windows, too many indirect pointers to remember… yaaaaaaaaa… it felt just like programming in assembly language! If the diagrammatic notation is also good for organizing my thoughts, maybe it’s also the obvious input medium — not unlike that of Compendium, so we’re having a think as to whether this is possible. The key will still be the automatic discovery of these threads, but some ’seeding’ will clearly be necessary.

[It occurs to me as I write this that my hidden algorithm for choosing between My Dog and Get Real for postings like this is simple: if it feels totally flakey and ill-formulated, then I post it here, where I'll annoy fewer readers! ]

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