Allen Searls responds to my comment about a mechnism for bloggers to connect with the Wondir Q & A service.

My concerns include

Wondir … seems a bit of a roach motel of users … in so far as Wondir users have little reason to leave the site for any of their Wondir-related activity. I think that’s fine – it fits Wondir’s model nicely and the users seem to like it – but it doesn’t give bloggers much motivation; they’ll get answer(s), sure, but they won’t get additional visits or page-reads without a way to connect the question on Wondir back to the blog post.

Not that that’s all-important or anything, but the ability to create webs of meaning by “connecting the dots” seems integral to many bloggers’ view of the Web, and currently Wondir sits outside of that. Without a 2-way connection I don’t see a lot of uptake among bloggers (but I’ve been wrong before )

Allen’s response

One solution is to have Wondir automatically publish a link and blurb pointing to the blog and/or the post itself from which the question originated. The answerer can then visit the blog directly if he/she wishes. Also, it’s possible that rather than a trackback-back to the original question-post, the answerer could simply click-through and answer the question in the comments section of the blog post. Wondir could then either scrape and re-post the answer at Wondir as well, or could simply post a link at Wondir pointing to the answer in the comments section of the blog post at hand. Just thinking out loud…

This is great; this kind of thinking out loud and publicly is the way great stuff gets made IMHO (though I’m generally a little gun-shy about it).

To be clear, I may have made my comments a little too harsh – I certainly never thought this was unaccomplishable…

I think that having the answerers post their answers in the blog post’s comments would decrease the actual responsiveness from the Wondir community – if the Wondir users have to leave the site the the Wondir-ness of the overall solution is decreased and uptake on the Wondir side will be smaller – almost certainly a negative effect. No, I think the answers need to be given on Wondir, and adding them to the post via trackback ping is most effective. It begs 2 questions, however:

1. parsing the trackback URL of a post is not always easy for a human, let alone an application
2. not all blogs allow for trackbacks

More intersting questions arise when you start to think about the architecture of displaying the post on Wondir or on the blog initially:

• How will Wondir take the ping for the initial question? Just a URL, which Wondir will then go and scrape, or a URL for reference and the text of the question? Both have their strengths; Just a URL is easy for the publisher but harder for Wondir, but passing the text would allow the publisher to tailor the text of the question. Since some blog posted questions could have considerable background information, perhaps a way for the questioner to excerpt the question text would be wise. On the other hand, perhaps Wondir’s not the best place to postback long questions.
• perhaps a trackback for link to the question on wondir would be a wise choice. That way Wondir might glean a few extra registered members?
• Could Wondir trackback comments on the post as answers on Wondir? Again, a new way to get additional readers, both for the blog in question and for Wondir itself.

P.S.: I have to admit, this post has been mouldering in my “ToDo” basket for so long that I may have lost the original thread. Please treat me gently

This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2005 at 3:58 am and is filed under The 'Net .
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