back from a long weekend

hi everyone, i've been gone for the past few days and i haven't been blogging. i went up to seattle to do some interviews (you can probably guess who) and stayed for the weekend. it was a pretty fun trip and i got to spend some quality time with my girlfriend and other seattle friends - and of course, it's always great to make a visit on the corporate dime :).

i hadn't been keeping up on reading my feeds so right before my return trip this morning, i synced up onfolio. with only 35 feeds, i had a whopping 600+ unread items! granted, i subscribe to a few linkblogs and news feeds, but still, that is quite a backlog for only 5 days. i can only imagine what scoble's aggregator looks like when he goes on vacation (he supposedly subscribes to over 1000 feeds).

i spent the entire plane ride reading through the stuff i've missed the past few days and i recognized a few interesting things:

• most events/products/ideas are covered simultaneously by tons of bloggers
• at least 75% of posts are just links to other posts, sometimes with a short comment or two
• feeds that only send synopses are really annoying

sometimes, as is the case with google's autolink feature controversy, people are actually having conversations through posts (as in, they write posts in response to other peoples' posts and so on). while i recognized the conversational nature of blogging due to the comments feature, i hadn't really seen a conversation happen between blog posts.

this led me to thinking about how the commenting features work. perhaps instead of comments residing on the original blog, what should happen is comments on posts should actually become new entries in the commentor's blog. then there should be an infrastructure where you can move through a blog "hyper-thread", tracking the conversation. in other words, let's turn the blogosphere into a big bulletin board but instead of being centered around threads, it would be centered around individuals. in this system, comments are obsolete and trackbacks can serve as the glue behind the scenes that ties blogs together. in this world, maybe sites like technorati will serve as directories of these "hyper-threads".

sorry if this idea has already been done or is already underway and i'm just not in the know. if that's the case, send me a link so i can check it out!

back to the original topic... being able to catch up on blogs on the plane was a killer experience. client side aggregators really shine through here but there are a lot of cool things about having a web based solution as well. i'm patiently waiting for a hybrid online/offline solution; i hope someone comes through sooner rather than later - and if anyone is working on one of these, let me know, i'll definitely be willing to help out.