Right Conversation, Wrong Place


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Let’s say you found out that Ingrid Bergman was hosting a big do, to which hundreds of people had been invited including one Albert Einstein. Let’s also say you’re a keen physicist but Bert’s name meant nothing to you. What might happen in the real world is this: you turn up, you chat to your skilled hostess Ingrid for admittedly longer than you mean to, and, to be quite honest, longer than she can really bear. She realises that you’re interested in physics, knows that Bert and friends are munching away having a relativity pow-wow over peanuts, and takes you over to their group, introduces you and returns to look after her other guests. You, Bert and his mates have a conversation. Good hosting, good conversation.

What happens in the world of blogs is very different. Ingrid hosts a party and you can tell it’s a big do because Technorati lets you see how many people are coming. Ingrid provides a whole load of links, some interesting, some not. She doesn’t really comment much on who’s there other than Chaplin said something funny the other day, or that Bert is doing something completely oblique to do with relatives. But – and here’s the rub – because she’s such a popular hostess, her parties are so famous and well-publicized, she brings together such an interesting blend of guests, that you talk to her and her alone. You listen to what she has to say about physics. Poor hosting, poor conversation.

Ingrid becomes the de facto interesting physicist, Bert gets lost in the crowd – the conversation happens at the wrong place. Worse still, as and when you host your own parties and talk about that relatives theory others, Ingrid’s status as the best thrower of parties for physicists grows. And it grows in a power law fashion.


Getting to Bert
This may all sound like so much nonsense – the party example is just me trying to get things clearer in my own head, with only a modicum of success – but I do think there’s a real problem here. Conversations are happening at the wrong place. We ought to be able to get to Bert, or at least to those chatting round the peanut bowl. The problem is how.

One way might be a slightly less catch-all approach to links. And it doesn’t have to be astrophysics: two types of links would be enough to distinguish host and guest.

  1. Host Links (e.g. for Ingrid)
    Description: The standard “this is interesting” but no real comment link.
    Keywords: hat tip, thanks to, via …
    Link mechanism: trackback (to guest blog)?
  2. Guest Links (e.g. for Bert.)
    Description: The standard honest comment link, with links to sources, articles etc
    Keywords: blockquote, which made me think, and here’s another thought …
    Link mechanism: a href to source or guest?

OK, so the categories are permeable. And the link mechanisms never quite break down like that. Hosts do sometimes have conversations, and guests sometimes act as mini-hosts. And who knows when to trackback and when to link? But surely by distinguishing between the types of links, we can begin to see the types of role people are taking at the party? And then can’t we at least leave Ingrid to her filmy types and go talk with Bert? It might even help tools like Technorati sort out who’s who at the party.

Or again you could have the del.icio.us/furl type links as host links, and all the others as guest links. Any ideas are so much more than welcome

Ho hum.