July 22, 2008

• Xanga Feature Suggestion: Blog Replies

  Xanga, more than any other blogging or social networking site I think revolves around the “comment”. You get credits for comments. You cross advertise through comments. You get eprops usually through comments. You leave minis on comments.  Comments are the measure through which people judge how popular a blog entry is or how interested they might be in reading it.

  For many, Xanga is basically all about the comments. It’s not uncommon for a user to spend more time commenting on other people’s blogs than they do writing their own!  This is very different from a lot of other blogging sites where comments are sort of incidental and people barely use them. In a way, Xanga feels more like a big gigantic Forum than it does a blogging site. And that also leads to the sense of closeness between users that permeates Xanga. It’s something very much akin to what you see in a lot of online forum communities.

  This is why, any features that enhance the commenting capacity of users can create great dividends for the community. These features are empowering for users. They encourage users to  interact more in the community and become closer.   Why was the online status feature such a success? Because it encouraged more comments. Why was the “reply” feature a success? Why were minis a success? Why is the credit system working? You can tell by the features Xanga has been implementing that they value greatly the importance of comments to the functioning of the Xanga community. It’s largely one of the aspects of Xanga that most makes Xanga stand out in its little niche of the internet.

  So I’d like to suggest a rather obvious feature that I think would work very well along the same lines: 

  Blog Replies

  How would it work?  Well it’s really a rather simple idea. Imagine you are wandering through Xanga and you come across an entry that inspires you to write not just a small couple of sentences but a whole essay or a whole presentation in reply. You’ve got a lotta things to say about this! And what’s more you want others, your subscribers and friends to *read* what you have to say about it.

  Right now what are your options?  One option is to leave a crazy long comment expressing all your ideas. Chances are… nobody will read your reply. Maybe the person who wrote the blog will, but passerby’s probably won’t take the time.  What’s more your giant reply disrupts the flow of conversation, clutters the comment history and generally just annoys people.

  Or you post your own blog entry about it. Here you don’t disrupt the comments on the initial blog, but your entry is completely disjoint from the original. And chances are nobody who read the original would ever come across your discussion. Even the person who wrote the original entry them self!  And users who follow your blog don’t read the original either.  So you have to post a link on your blog entry back to the original, explaining that you are replying. And then you have to leave a comment on the original with a link to your new entry.  And people look at you weirdly for leaving a link as your comment. Most are too lazy to follow it. Maybe you solicit the original writer and that person endorses your entry and writes about it in his or her blog which gets people to read it. But even then, it’s a lot of work.

  Blog Replies automate this whole process of dual linking between separate writers blog entries. Basically you’d have a “blog reply” button you can click to reply to a blog entry instead of comment. When you click this button you get the standard blog entry editor and you can write your own full blog entry. That entry appears on YOUR blog with a link on it pointing back to the original entry to which you are replying. And then on the entry you are replying to there’d be a special section that shows the Blog Replies that have been made to this entry.

  Actually…

  Xanga Already Has Blog Replies
  
  But only in a very specialized area. The Featured Questions.  These are blog entries in a special blog and everyone who “answers” the question is effectively writing a blog reply to that entry. And it links back to the original.  So probably the easiest implementation of Blog Reply would be to somehow generalize the Featured Question system. Basically every blog entry would have an optional link that says “blog reply”  much like the “answer it” link on featured questions. And then there’d be a line at the bottom of the entry you write that says “I am replying to <entry name> by <user>. You can too!”  Or something like that.

  That’d be the simplest implementation.  Personally I’d make it a more comprehensive system. Indeed, I’d make it so there’s a section at the bottom of each blog entry with a scrolling list of all the blog replies that have been made to this entry. Each blog reply would appear as a uniform size horizontal “banner” like running across the screen.  The list would show: the profile picture of the replier,  the subject of the reply,  a couple of line snippet of the reply entry, and a link to the replier’s blog entry.   It would also show eprops left and mini’s left since you’d still be able to do that in a blog reply just like you could for any comment.   Also possibly it might show whether the replier recommended the original entry and/or the number of recommendations and/or star rating of the blog reply.

  Then on the other end there’s similarly be a banner at the top of the blog reply entry on the replier’s blog that shows vital statistics about the original entry to which you are replying with a link and the profile picture of the original writer’s post.

  Basically what I’m talking about is a very visible way of cross advertising each other’s sites while allowing a conversation to “branch” out into other people’s blogs.

  I’d also make it so that in the subscription browser a blog reply entry shows the entry to which it is replying, and every entry that has blog replies shows also a list at the bottom of the links of all blog replies made to it.

  Lastly I’d create certain user controls to prevent problematic situations. First, just like with comments a blogger can manage the blog replies to his or her own blog.  He or she can’t delete the reply as that’d be like going into someone’s blog and deleting their entries, but he or she could delete the blog reply link so that the reply entry is no longer advertised on their blog.

  The only other control I’d create is the ability to optionally disable or enable blog replies independently of comments.  That means you could write an entry that allows blog replies but not comments, comments but not blog replies or both or neither. Featured Questions could then be reimplemented as Blog Replies with regular comments disabled.  And Xanga could implement other new features like Featured Questions in much the same way.

  One last possible control would be to allow restricted list blog replies. Like “protected” you could have an entry where only certain users specified by the writer are allowed to post blog replies. I think that control would probably be more trouble than it’s worth to implement but it’s definitely a possibility to keep in mind.

  And that’s pretty much it.

  One particularly good application of Blog Replies that a lot of Xangans in this day and age would be particularly interested in I think would be the ability to use them in Contests.  It would make contests a lot easier to create.

  For example let’s say I wanted to run a contest called “Xangan Philosopher King”.  All I’d have to do is create a post saying “Think you got what it takes to be Xanga’s next philosopher King? If you do submit your entry by Blog Replying to this Post!”  And that’s all I gotta do. I don’t have to get messages sent to me. I don’t have to edit and keep re-timestamping my entry personally making links to all of these blog entries of the contestants. That’d all be done for me right through the Blog Reply system!  People who want to read through the contestants entries just read through the blog replies. Easy! 

  And say some bonehead comes along and posts a blog reply that says “Your contest is a simple and elegant design. Come visit my site so I can tell you  how to lead your life according to my own screwed up ideals.” Well I just peruse through the blog replies and delete the link to that entry and to any other blog replies that aren’t official contest entries. My contest maintenance would be a LOT easier wouldn’t it?

  Cool huh?

  Similarly you can do all kinds of cool stuff through blog replies. You can run polls through blog replies. You can do sort of collaborative choose your own adventure stories with branching story lines. You can do “tagging” like occurs in deviant art (someone posts an entry with a task to complete, completes and says that “tags” others to reply and do the same). You can work on joint projects more easily using blog replies. The Xanga Team could implement a suggestions and ideas forum that works through blog replies. The possibilities are nearly endless. Users would find all kinds of ways to utilize blog replies to their advantage. And of course if users don’t like them they can just never enable blog replies for their entries. In fact that could be right there in their options screen an ability to disable all blog replies by default.

  I must admit this idea is not *entirely* original. In addition to its roots in the existing featured question system, it also would be rather similar to Youtube’s Video Responses feature. Only, in my opinion it would work a lot better for blogs and way better for Xanga’s blogging system just because of the importance Xanga puts on comments. And since Xanga allows videos, pulses, and blogs, it becomes sort of a more powerful generalization of the Video Responses feature of youtube.
  
  Another Good Idea

  What if not only could you blog reply to someone else’s blog, but you could also blog reply to someone’s comment.  One of the only problems I have with the current reply system is that everything is flat.  Nothing is segmented. That means that it’s very easy for a thread to get hijacked and go off on divergent tangents. With a more traditional forum threading system, tangents all fall into their own thread which other users who don’t care can ignore.

  Blog replies to comments would enable this same benefit only in a manner that fits in more with the Xanga system. That is someone leaves a comment on your blog or on someone else’s blog and you have a lot to say in reply to it. Instead of hijacking the entire discussion about the original entry you Blog Reply. An entry appears on your blog and a small reply is placed in the original entry as a reply to the comment in question. And an email goes out to that commenter as usual saying someone has blog replied to their entry.  Then if the person you are blog replying to wants to follow up with the discussion they can go to your blog and leave comments. And anyone else interested in this side discussion can follow suit.

  Between blog replies of this kind and the existing flat multiple entry replies I think you’d have a really powerful comment system that has all the benefits of a threaded forum and much more utility besides. It would, I think, make Xanga perhaps one of the most powerful discussion forums on the internet, if it isn’t that already. 
  
  Interaction With Existing Systems

  The last question to ask is how blog replies and blog comment replies would interact with existing systems. There are some possibilities. A blog reply could auto-recommend the original entry, having a message pop in the feed that says “<blah> recommended and blog replied to the entry <bleh>”.   Blog replies could show recommendations and overall star ratings as I described above as a sort of form of cross advertising. Blog replies could show up in the subscription browser and/or feed.  Maybe even a tree’d view could be used.

  The hard question is how does this interact with credits?  Should blog replies give you or the person to whom you are replying a lot of credits or a small amount of credits or even no credits? The argument for a small or no credits is that you don’t actually want people abusing the system and “blog replying” everywhere. A low credit count could discourage empty idiotic blog replies. The argument for giving more is that blog replying takes more effort than regular commenting generally and it does add quite a big to the discussion when used correctly. It can also drive more traffic to the original site which is a big benefit. Experimentation I think would need to be used to determine the right implementation. It would depend a lot on how popular blog replies become once implemented.  But I think getting a credit bonus for writing blog replies at first would be a very good idea. It could also be used to give you a nice bonus for answering the featured question which would encourage more users to answer them.

  How About A Mod System

  OK, one last last idea. What if users have even more fine tuned control over the blog replies placed on their blog to the point where they can control to what extent they are advertised by the writer. For example you can mod a blog reply up if you like it or down if you don’t like it. The ones you mod up appear higher up on the list of blog replies to your blog and stand out more. Hence again you can kind of prevent excessive abuse of the blog reply system by limiting the benefit users get from posting silly or irrelevant blog replies.

  In a very real sense blog replies serve two very powerful purposes for the Xangan community. They would strengthen and empower the existing comment systems adding more flexibility and opening up new possibilities. And second they would encourage more actual *blogging* on Xanga at the same time. Users can effectively be blogging and commenting at once  No longer would you have to choose on which of these two activities you should most spend your time.
  
  Your Thoughts?

  Good idea? Bad idea?  Comment. Reply. Star. Eprop. Recommend. Message. And/Or Blog Reply with your thoughts or opinions! I’d love to hear them.

  • 10:21 am
  • 195 Comments