An alternate view for weblogs
Average Reading Time: less than a minute.
Over at Web-Dawn, the multi-blog owner Mark Carey has built an alternate view for his weblog — and for any Movable Type weblog — which allows the reader to look at the weblog as if it were a web-based forum. This view
…displays the blog entries similar to topics in a discussion forum. The title of each blog entry is shown, along with the entry author, the number of replies, and the name and date of the most recent reply. Just like a forum, the entries are sorted in descending order by the date of the replies — so the entry with the most recent reply is shown at the top of the list…
This is another tool in the arsenal of “weblogs as conversations”. The reader has a visual sense of which entries are most popular, and, with Mark’s templates, the responses are given as much importance as the original entry, eliminating the seeming “power” difference between the author and the commenters. I’m not sure how hard it would be to do, but if Mark could add trackbacks in as comments, the conversations could grow even deeper.