Jon Schull writes on visualising the relationships between blogs and blog posts (“BlogThreads”).
Jon Udell: My reflex comment is that if the authoring UI were to capture just a sprinkling of metadata — for example, cues that a post intends to “opine” or “clarify” or “disagree” or “summarize” — then these kinds of visualizations would become much more feasible. But the use of such cues, like the use of titles, would take a little time to do, and a little thought to do well.
Dave Winer: As long as I’ve been doing outliners, people have been trying to do boxes-and-arrows visualizations of the same structures, with tantalizing and colorful demos, that aren’t too useful. I did a project myself in the mid-80s. The user interface was unwieldy.
