Remembering the Future

The PDC was probably the most blogged event of all time. I went to the Blogger BOF and picked up a few ideas that took a while to sink in. One interesting comment that was made was how the evolution of blogging was not just driven by geeks, but by teenage girls pouring their innermost thoughts out onto the Web. These hundreds of thousands of experiments in collaborative communications, some of them of near suicidal intensity are helping figure out how collaboration on the web works. The result of these experiments has had a dramatic impact on how I thing of applications. Even something as mundane as my latest intranet reporting system has been completely altered by this experience. The whole user interface of listing entries in reverse chronological order with links for comments, and controlling this view through a calendar control and a category and blogroll list is a direct result of this experience. Some of the challenges that still need to be addressed, and the main focus of the BOF, was how to get this approach to scale past the current capabilities of weblog aggregators. My only additional thought is that, to do this, we need to move beyond lists and outlines to structures that can support a kind of extended and collective memory that we project out onto the internet and can then refer back to when we need to, using something like the next generation of google. See also: Thoughts from the Blogger BOF Future Vision - Tivo For Blogging Extended Blog Conversation PDC - Weblogging the Future of Conversational Software