some needs for blogs
[the following is an excerpt from an email i sent:]
Sorry to ramble — I have a question or two at the end.
I checked out your blogs (kiloblog, blogometer) for the first time today.
Enjoyed skimming over them — an activity I rarely engage in. 
[note: In the following I ramble on about ideas of what I think blogs “should” do. If there are already blog solutions that implement some of these features, I do not know about them because of my very limited real-world experience with both reading and writing blogs.]
[note: I do not consider any of this my intellectual property. If you like any of these ideas enough to run with them, please do so.]
One of my pie-in-the-sky dreams, as we may have discussed, is to write
blog software that would allow for authentication and then push
relevant entries (or emphasize them) to the reader based on her
profile of interests, or to push entries to different forward-facing
sites. (For example, under this scenario, both kiloblog.com and
blogometer.com would pull their content from the same underlying blog
database.)
Also readers could subscribe using a topic- or content-specific
filter, so that they get notified (RSS’ed ?) only when a post is made
that contains subject-matter or concepts from a set of their
pre-defined interests. (This might be of limited use applied to one
blog author, but applied to a community (or universe) of blogs, I
think this would be a very attractive feature.) I find it very likely
that something like this already exists.
Another cool feature I have daydreamed would be expandible-collapsible
blocks of text that would contain tangential or parenthetical notes.
For example, in a document intended primarily for a non-technical
audience, (like my managers) I would author technical details inside
such a box such that the secondary audience (my coworkers) could read
them, but my managers could easily ignore them.
As an offshoot, imagine writing a status report to a client, but then
also including private details intended only for your a limited
audience (like your development team) all in the same document.
(I am aware that all of these features would require a special
authoring interface that would allow for meta-tagging at such a small
level of granularity. You and I can probably both see the feasibility
of implementing such a thing with javascript.)
I think your “sub-blog” idea (from our conv. early summer ‘05) was
along similar lines. I guess what interests me specifically is the
underlying technical approach to such a scenario.
Riffing off of our conversations also, it would be great to have a
blog entry that is versioned and can revert itself to any arbitrary
version of itself for the reader. (So, for example, you could correct
yourself or build on your own ideas, but still have the earlier
versions of the document available for posterity and reference (which
might come in handy to synch the entry up with a comment that would
otherwise be irrelevant).)
The 37signals product “Basecamp” (free web-based project management)
has a widget they call a “writeboard” that implements such a feature,
but it is not dressed up as a blog.
Despite all this empty brainstorming, to-date i have *no* blog at all
(save for a handful of bad purple-prose entries on myspace) and I am
no closer to implementing the above than I ever have been.
Given that you have far more experience than me, could you please tell
me the blog software you use for your blogs? Do you recommend that
software? We are pretty big into Moveable Type (exclusively, i think)
here at the PR firm. Of course, all of us php developers bemoan its
being written in Perl.
I don’t realistically expect ever to get around to implementing most
of the wacky features I have outlined above. Ironically, I would
rather blog about them and see if someone else ever gets around to it.
;)
–mark meves