Category: General

My head hurts from thinking too much. My heart hurts from feeling too little.

Charlie Chaplin: “We think too much and feel too little.”

Say a community of twenty bloggers wants to all talk about a specific topic that is of importance to the entire community. How would you best do this based upon the following criteria?

• Allow each person to respond to the topic on their own site.
• Allow those viewing the response to see everyone else involved in the discussion as well, no matter what site you were on.
• Allow others to easily add themselves to the discussion without having to sign up to anything at all.

In effect, the end result is that you are creating a sort of decentralized virtual gathering place. No matter which site you are on, you see all of those involved in the discussion.

Trackback Route

You could theoretically do this with trackbacks but it would be a major pain in the ass. Imagine if you wanted to be a part of the topic discussion that already involved twenty people in it. This means in adding yourself to the conversation, you’d have to send twenty trackback pings, one for each person already in the conversations so that your new response gets added as a trackback below each of their responses on their own sites. In addition, each of those twenty people, when seeing your new trackback added to their list, would have to send a trackback ping to your new response so that all of their previous responses get added as trackbacks below your response on your site as well. As I said, the more people involved in the community discussion the more complex and time consuming it gets.

Technorati Route

I also realized that you could just go to Technorati and see all those people linking to the originating question but there are issues with this approach as well. First off, it doesn’t allow you see those participating in the conversation on your site itself, as you have to go to Technorati’s site to see the list of people’s responses on the subject. Even more so, it requires that everyone who wants to participate in the community discussion ensures that they link to the originating topic question. This doesn’t always happen. Someone may come along and instead link to someone else responding to the question but not to the originating question. This happens all the time and, therefore, looking at Techorati doesn’t give you an accurate scope of those involved in the discussion. For extremely large community discussions though, this would be the way to go as showing a list of hundreds of people on your site wouldn’t be realistic. Instead you could go to Technorati and browse through those engaged in the community discussion.

Hmm, too bad the community itself couldn’t then rate these contributions to the community discussion somehow so that the best responses were always near the top. This would be kind of like how Technorati rates blogs right now but instead for a specific community conversation. Not sure how it could do it but maybe it might be feasible if your response you linked to those community responses you thought were good as well as the originating question. Therefore, on Technorati’s end, not only could they create a list based upon the originating question surrounding the community discussion but it could sort the list based upon the most linked to responses that originate from within the list.

Ok, wait a minute. I just realized that Technorati gives you an RSS feed for watchlists now. I haven’t used this yet but I’m assuming it only shows the latest feeds that were added to the watchlist. Therefore, if a community wanted to have a discussion around a topic, the originator of the topic could create a watchlist for it and relay that information as well. That way those engaged in the discussion could display the lastest people participating in the community discussion right on their own site’s using a utility like RSS to Javascript. And again, maybe the originator of the community discussion could give out this script code for others to use. Too bad that Techorati didn’t have some script code to show this directly somehow. You just insert the code and not only does it show the latest people engaged in the community “watchlist” discussion but it automatically adds you to the discussion and provides a link to show how others can join as well (i.e. Want to be a part of this community discussion? Here’s how you easily can with Technorati!). Everything in one small package! Now that would be nice!

Well that was a short “sleep” for this site. I’ve already got a ton of ideas again. Time to start manifesting them though, instead of just rolling them around in my head.

This site is going into sleep mode for a while, no idea how long. Need to do some thinking and restructuring before I decide to progress further with it. My archives will still be accessible by month if you care to take a poke around in the dust.

I’m heading off tomorrow on holidays and I just want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, as I doubt I’ll be posting again until after Boxing Day or maybe even New Years Day. Here’s also wishing you a stress-free and sick-free holidays. Yes, that’s right, I’ve gotten sick, as well as my wife, just in time for the holidays (similar to a few other friends we know). It’s almost as though your body knows you’re going to take time off and it begins shutting down to force you to recuperate, whether you like it or not. Oh well, I hope it doesn’t last that long because it would be nice to have at least a couple days off to enjoy the festive season without being sick. 🙂

Most businesses think that when something goes wrong with a customer’s order or service you are providing them, that it is only one mishap. Wrong. When something screws up and it is due to your business, then there are actually three separate things that can go wrong.

1. The Mistake – Strike one! Something screwed up on your end and the customer is pissed.
2. The Coverup – Strike two! You try to cover up the mistake by saying it was due to something else when you know that’s not true.
3. The Break – Strike three! You’re out! You can obviously tell the customer is upset but you don’t do anything to try to make up for your company’s mistake. You just lost a customer.

The hilarious thing here is that I’m not talking about business rocket science here. This is common sense relationship life skills. Don’t expect any relationship to continue for too long if you continually ignore your “partner”.

I’ve been playing the World of Warcraft the last month and I have to say that while I wouldn’t really call it my “dream” massively multiplayer online game, I would still say it is very enjoyable nonetheless. Without a doubt, the expansiveness of the realms you play within is one of the game’s greatest strengths. There will be points where you’ll just stop in your tracks and just sit there and enjoy the view for a few moments. Yet what I still find lacking is the level of interaction that I’m looking for on a realm vs realm level that involves much more usage of community and culture to foster cooperation among players on a larger level.

For example, when I’m playing in the World of Warcraft, while I may feel like I’m part of the Alliance, I don’t see any direct correlation between my actions and that of the Alliance’s goals overall. To make players feel like they are part of something larger than themselves, the game world itself needs to allow them to be a part of an ongoing story, no matter how small their contribution to it. I’d love to see the borders between the various lands changing on a regular basis depending upon who controls these areas so that a player who is a miner knows that his efforts in collecting ore went directly to aiding a blacksmith who in turn helped produced armor and weapons for the warriors who help defend and maintain the borderlands. Each player focuses on what they enjoy and yet all contribute to the greater cause.

That’s all that people really want.

I’m 40 but I still feel like I’m 4 exploring the world for the first time. I think that’s because play has been a big influence on my life. Well that is up until the last five years or so. Time to fix that I think, especially in 2006. I mean what’s the point of living if you’re not having fun doing it, right?

Enough said.