I miss the days when blogs were conversational. Twitter certainly expanded the conversation, but I fear we’ve lost the deep, nuanced conversations from the early days of blogging. Now we mostly write articles like journalists rather than engaging in professional interaction
— Phil Windley (@windley) December 10, 2021It was born of necessity. Before blog comments appeared, the conversation had to be blog-to-blog. And it was ok to write just a sentence or two in response, more than a tweet but less than a fully-formed essay.
— Jon Udell (@judell) December 10, 2021Trackback was one of the best web ideas ever and wonderful way to enable those conversations.
— Matt (@mterenzio) December 12, 2021And it came together in weekend.
— Jon Udell (@judell) December 12, 2021
We could still choose to use our blogs that way. I wonder what conditions would motivate that choice.
I’ve seen a growing group of others who are using and displaying Webmentions for site-to-site conversations. If you use WordPress, there’s the Webmention plugin for the notifications part and the Semantic Linkbacks plugin for the display part. (One day the two will merge, we hope.)
Plugins and modules exist for a number of other systems if they’re not already built in.
I’m using all these on my site to have site-to-site conversations with others. I’m also using Brid.gy to bridge the gap between WordPress and Twitter (and others). If you prefer, you could read all this on my site.
Happy to help others set this up for themselves, should they need help. #DoOO