How to Make Blogs More Conversational

conversation
Painting “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell
For a while now I’ve been promising to write about how blogs could be made more conversational. To broach this challenge, I thought it might be useful to look at the nature and structure of conversations. Thereís a whole discipline around this subject (called ‘conversation analysis’) but I would argue (contrary to Noam Chomskyís alleged argument that conversations defy systematic analysis) that the rules of conversations are generally quite simple. By parsing a bunch of conversations I’ve listened to, and another bunch of online ‘conversations’ I read in discussion forums, I’ve observed the following:

  1. Conversations consist of threads. A thread can be either concluded or just left dangling. New threads can be created branching off from an existing thread.
  2. As the number of participants engaged in a conversation increases, it becomes more likely that some participants will be ignored (in which case the threads in which they participate are left dangling as the other participants simply ‘jump over’ their contribution) and also that multiple threads will be produced, some of which will involve fewer than the total number of participants. When it comes to conversations, the natural number always seems to be 2. Genuinely involving more than 2-3 participants in a conversation is hard work.
  3. There is an implicit turn-taking process in conversations: Each speaker either explicitly or by implication either (a) specifies who they think should speak next (and may suggest which thread the next speaker should speak about) or (b) opens the conversation to any participant to self-select to speak next (again, possibly after suggesting what thread that speaker should speak about, and possibly after stating or implying that in so doing they believe the thread they have just addressed is concluded).
  4. Interruptions are common in conversations. They usurp the speaker’s privilege of choosing the next speaker. They may or may not leave a thread dangling and start a new one, or return to another dangling or open, active thread.
  5. Provocations (sometimes in the form of questions or implied questions) are common in conversations. They may start a new thread when there is a lull in the conversation (i.e. when no one is picking up on any open threads, or when there are no open threads). Or they may start a new thread with the intention of leaving the last thread dangling.
  6. A facilitator can make a conversation more cohesive by picking up dangling threads and by managing the turn-taking process.

Listen to a conversation, or read one in an online forum, and I think you’ll see that they seem to conform to these high-level rules. In fact, the concept of threads is used by online forums to facilitate ‘following’ these conversations and deciding which ones to pursue. In oral conversations I’ve listened to and tried to ‘map’, it’s astonishing (comical, even) how many threads are left dangling and how many threads are started that have absolutely no relationship or segue from the threads that immediately preceded them!

Unfortunately, many forum participants fail to acknowledge that they have started a new thread, and others will start allegedly ‘new’ threads to ‘escape’ an old one they feel they are not getting attention in, when in fact what they are writing is the continuation of an existing thread. The habits of interrupting, shouting and hijacking oral conversations have managed to creep into online conversations in their own way.

In an oral conversation your body language can clearly indicate who you are conversing with (and specifically, whose thread you are picking up on and who you believe should speak next). In an online conversation, however, unless you start your comment with the name of the person you’re picking up from and conclude with the name of the person you’re looking to get a response from, your thread can easily be left dangling or be hijacked, especially if the person you hope to hand off to is not monitoring the conversation, creating a pause that others may well not wait for.

Apply these rules to the comments in a blog, and you’ll understand why I see blogs as breeding grounds for dangling conversations. The blog post itself is often seen as the start of a thread, and, if the author allows comments, presumably s/he is inviting others to join the conversation. I’ve noticed that when I conclude a blog post with a question (making this invitation explicit and opening it up to anyone to pursue the thread suggested by the question) I get a lot more comments than when I don’t.

But since there is no protocol governing blog comments, it is often ambiguous whether the commenter is (a) looking for the author of the blog to reply, or (b) hoping other readers will reply to them (rather than starting their own new thread branching off from the blog post), or (c) not expecting any followup at all ñ closing the thread and making way for others to open new ones.

This is confusing, because a blog post itself isn’t really the start of a conversation thread, but rather a provocation, a jumping off point and invitation to any number of people to start threads based on the post. When the first commenter ‘responds’ to the blog post, s/he is really opening up a new thread, such that any subsequent commenters have the choice to either (a) start another, independent thread responding to the main post, or (b) respond to and therefore continue the previous commenter’s thread. Despite the competition on some popular blogs to be the first to comment, and the optics, every commenter really has this same (a) or (b) choice.

Online forums have evolved some protocols that make that clumsy conversational vehicle work reasonably well, and a protocol for making blogs more ‘conversational’ should start with these. So here are my suggestions:

  1. There should be a process to allow people to ‘subscribe’ to the comments to any blog post, and get notified of new comments posted.
  2. Each comment should have space for, and begin with, a one-sentence summary of the commenter’s point (not the subject or thread title, the point they’re making) to make browsing long comments threads easier.
  3. The comment mechanism should require each commenter to indicate who they’re replying to: the author of the main article or the author of one of the previous comments. The blog tool should then automatically ‘thread’ the comments accordingly.
  4. The comment mechanism should allow each commenter to indicate what kind of response they would like, by checking off one of (a) response is requested from the person their comment is replying to, (b) response is requested from anyone who wants to chime in, or (c) no response is expected (closing that thread). The person(s) who have been requested to respond should get an e-mail notifying them of this fact (in case (b) the e-mail would go to anyone who ‘subscribed’ to the conversations for the blog post).
  5. There should be a simple, short, polite way for the person getting a request to respond and who has nothing substantial to say, or wishing to acknowledge a compliment in a thread, to just say ‘thank you’ and close that thread.
  6. The ability of most discussion forums to copy & paste excerpts from whatever the commenter is replying to (Jo said: ”   “, in a box to start the comment) should also be available in blog comments.
  7. Trackbacks should be integrated into comments as separate threads that readers can pursue at the other site — they’re part of the conversation, too, albeit moved to another site.
  8. The comments threads should be appended to the actual blog post, rather than being kept elsewhere apart. Some blog tools do this. Others (like the one I use) don’t.
  9. Comments threads should make it easy to include links and other html (Radio Userland of late has been sending 403 messages to commenters using html).
  10. Bloggers and commenters should be able to note their Skype address and/or IM address and invite others to sign up for scheduled real-time chats on the entire article or some aspect or comment thread stemming from it. The recorded archives of such real-time sidebar conversations should be embedded in, or at least linked to, the applicable thread.

Now you have a vehicle for real, extended, coherent, multimedia conversations.

This has some interesting implications. Trolls and flames will be pretty obvious and hopefully more discouraged — their threads, hopefully, will always have only one dangling entry. Poor online conversationalists (whose threads are always left dangling and unanswered) will get the message and learn from others (whose threads blossom) how to be better at it. People who hijack the conversation will find their manipulations will be more easily recognized, and hence less tolerated by other participants. A lot of the private e-mails we bloggers receive about our posts might move back to the comments and become a permanent part of the conversation archive on the post, because of the advantages of this enhanced format over a disjointed e-mail. And instead of blog authors being just one more commenter on their own posts, they’ll be able to facilitate the conversation.

What do you think? Is it too much to expect such a blog comment protocol, if it were embedded in each of the more popular blogging tools, would actually be used properly and effectively by users? And if you’re one of the many bloggers who has turned comments off because they were just more trouble than they were worth, would this prompt you to turn themback on?

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12 Responses to How to Make Blogs More Conversational

  1. Jon Husband says:

    Bummer bummer bummer .. I left the longest (and of course most intelligent ;-) comment I have ever made on this blog about an hour and a half ago and somehow it got disappeared / swallowed up. NO WAY ! am I going to go through the pain of re-writing it .. you’ll just have to assume it was heartfelt, if not brilliant ;-)

  2. Jon Husband says:

    Have you ever looked in at the new-ish blog platform at the Firedoglake blog site ? It has some of the interesting ease-and-sophistication of use features you discuss, and mature pretty-good-at-self-regulating conversation focused community.

  3. Jon Husband says:

    Here’s a bizarre suggestion .. create a template, or blog commenting component / section that arranges the comments display into an ever-expanding circle (using the one sentence comment header / description You suggested, with an upper limit on how many until a second circle would be started, etc. .. maybe with the ability to drag a given comment into the center to lend some additional focus to an evolving conversation ?Just silly musing out loud …

  4. Mike says:

    Interesting, as I am concentrating on almost the opposite: how to make blogs way less conversational. Especially once human-written blogs become the minority and blogjects (objects that publish blogs) become the majority. (Maybe they have already?)Of course the focus has to shift from blogging where the author hopes to get read to blogging where the author hopes to get information extracted (with credits), and analyzed on more popular blogs.

  5. Bèr Kessels says:

    I have read your post with a lot of interest. And applied its suggestions (link to the article is my name above) to a CMS and blogging tool I work with/for: Drupal.The conclusion is, that Drupal has some work to do, but that the components, or at least most of the possibilities are there!

  6. Ross Day says:

    All great suggestions. Very impressive. One added thought: How can you track where you have left comments, and when responses have been left to them? A comments aggregator, as it were. Part of it would depend on blog etiquette and a way to guarantee that your comment alerts pertained to your comment and not others’.

  7. Ross Day says:

    … Or one could just learn to read blog posts more closely (like I didn’t). Thanks for saying pretty much what I said in your very first bullet point … and my apologies!

  8. Jon Husband says:

    Ross .. there is a web service that some (not lots, i don’t think) bloggers use called cocomments, that aggregates comments and then tracks and displays the comments that others leave in the “conversation” where your comment was left, in a widget on your blog,.When introduced It was seen as a great new possibility, but I am not sure it was easy enough to use nor perhaps was the way the connected comments displayed easy enough to “organize” cognitively when you were reading them on the blog widget display offered by Cocomments. Anyway, it doesn’t seem to have taken the blogworld by storm yet.I think it’s either at http://www.cocomments.com or http://www.cocomments.org

  9. Pearl says:

    WordPress has a lot of the plugins that cover trackback, subscribe, threadinf, avatars, html embedded. A way to say “nod” as feedback would be lovely. Can’t people already tell when they are throwing something in off topic?

  10. Dave Pollard says:

    Thanks, all. This thread both extends and, in its absence of emerging threads, makes my point. We’ll have to see what the next blog tools and the next versions of the existing ones look like – hopefully they’ll keep getting us closer to the ideal we all seek.

  11. ggwfung says:

    Hi Dave,whatever you may think of the antics over at digg, they have come up with an ingenious commenting system. It seems to scale up to huge numbers of almost simultaneous posts, a sort of moderating system, and threads that only go one level deep.I would love it if someone adapted it for wordpress.garry

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