The backside of the web

Following up on my post from yesterday called The end of blogging? Already? I'd like to add an example of development idea based on the 5 dimensions that I identified: Individuals, topics, opinions, things and time.

A majority of blog posts are structured in the same way: a quote from a web page, a link to the page from where the quote originates and a couple of ideas from the owner of the blog. Often there is also room for comments but rarely does an intense conversation take place there. In the terminology that I defined earlier we have a things and opinions.
The problem is that the scope of the information contained on this blog is limited by the individual to whom it belongs. Only the readers of that individual will be exposed to the opinions expressed on that blog. As a result readers or fellow bloggers are not very motivated to elaborate in the comment section as their readership is mostly elsewhere (TrackBacks address that issue to some extent but make real conversations almost impossible).

Now if we could shift dimensions and have the conversation take place in a larger scope —the readership of the referenced thing instead of that of the individual— things would get a lot more interesting for potential contributors to the dialogue. Here's how it could be done:

• An Individual posts an opinion about a web page on his blog. The blog post is also added to the backside of the original web page (Imagine that you could flip a web page and write on the back). This backside is nothing else that another web page associated to the URL of the main one. It is accessible to any visitor of the original web page.
• Any comment added to the individual's blog is added to the backside and any comment added to the backside is visible on the individual's blog.

The interest of this mechanism is that a conversation about a thing initiated on an individual's blog is visible and open to participation by a much larger audience (any visitor of the original page). Posts by different bloggers on the same thing in their respective blogs have the potential to generate a converging conversation of a much higher intensity than what would otherwise take place in a decentralised fashion.

Depending on what you want to use blogging for —better communicate in a professional environment, collaborate with peers or simply communicate your opinions to an audience— you are likely to look for different solutions. What is happening here is that as blogging matures, segmentation needs to take place to accommodate more specific needs.

In the meantime I invite you to follow me and check out Stuart Henshall's Yi-Tan for a glimpse at what the future of blogging might look like.