Advogato: More links!

Posted 8 Apr 2000 at 02:46 UTC by argent

This is a really nice contributive discussion web, with the articles driving threads of discussion and diary entries providing background, so you can see how people think about things. But it could use even more interconnectedness...

It would be interesting to see what would happen with articles and diaries explicitly linked, making the discussion web stronger. You would be able to put pointers to specific articles and diary entries in comments you make on them, and find them by following links from the article.

What am I thinking of? Well, start by adding a button on every diary entry and message... you hit it, and it brings up your diary page with a link to the message already entered in today's diary. You can edit around it to establish context.

Then on the original message, you get a list of the most recent ten entries, and a link to a page with all the responses in order.

Threads wouldn't be linear, or even a tree, but an unstructured directed graph. it would be a literal web of connections mirroring the wider WWW but updated and linked dynamically, a big fuzzy ball of discussion where you'd never follow the same path through twice.

Sort of like Vannevar Bush's Memex.

I found myself wishing for a way to get presented with a list of new replies. I admit that I'm very fond of the way News works, so maybe my ideas are somewhat biased. But nevertheless, here's a scenario: I come here, see an interesting article (possibly with some replies). I decide that this was really interesting and I would like to read further replies, as well. So what I have to do is to remember that there were N replies and to click on the article again if I see that there are more than N replies. This is a suboptimal situation, I think. I find that I'm longing for a newsreaderly view of the whole discussion, where each article is the root of a thread, and entering the article page shows me a list of threads, each thread containing article and replies, and the ones I've already read are marked. Using scoring, I could mark some threads as uninteresting, which means that they are marked as read automatically. Hm. Maybe an interface to the discussion structure based on NNTP would be a good idea? Then everybody could use their favorite news reader. Maybe the POST method would need some special treatment, where the Advogato server looks at the From header and replaces it with the nick name and the certification, or something. What do you all think? kai

Yes, more links, posted 8 Apr 2000 at 18:15 UTC by barryp »

I really like the idea I saw in someone's diary entry about each project having a recent diary entries link just for people associated with that project. Another set of links I'd like to see would be under the personal pages, linking to each article and article-response that person posted.

That's a great idea... links to "articles and replies recently posted by this person", that is.

Diary option?, posted 10 Apr 2000 at 17:41 UTC by sethcohn »

How about a button that adds a person's diary to your 'track it' list... and rather than just a list of new entries, you get the entire new diary entry (and JUST the new one) in toto.

This would allow you to track the people you want to read regularly, friends, etc... and by making it show you the whole diary entry, save clicks (and extra bandwidth loading the older stuff). A single page load could load 3 or 5 or whatever new entries, and they'd all be new stuff.

Right now in order to read the new diary entry, you have to click and backclick (or load in a new window) and then you get the user info (which you don't care about, it's usually the same), older diary entrys you probably read, who has certed them and who they've certed. I don't to see any of that... just the new entry.

This could be a new main section (ala Articles or Account) called Diaries... and it would look similar to Articles, but be just the diary entries. Title would be "Date - Person" by default, but you could add a Title form to the Diary entry section and that would replace the title (if desired)

Just noticed the Recent Diary Entries link. If that was there before, I missed it.

Still isn't quite what I asked (lacks a way to limit to just the people I want to see - it's everyone)

Of course, I was using Lynx some of the time... and it's just so easy to miss links with lynx. :)

signed - the other Seth....

Last Replies, posted 11 Apr 2000 at 10:41 UTC by lkcl »

I could do with a "Show me everything by date" Thing. Like all developing projects, it works, but it's a bit inconvenient. I posted to an older article, it disappeared instantly into the Beyond.

Although it would be convenient to be able to track only the new diary entries from only the people you want to track, this would mean you would never accidentally stumble across someone/something interesting without first having read something by/about them and following it up...

Personally, I think a lot of the web's strength comes from serendipity... this is the purpose of 'interesting links' pages... I almost phased mine out in my last homepage revision, but then I realised that following links at random has led to some of the most interesting trawls of the web that I've ever had... and I think this principle applies equally within the tighter constraints of a site like this one - and will apply more strongly as more people sign up and contribute...

Perhaps adding links to do what's suggested wouldn't prohibit the happy chance of new discoveries, but it's certainly something to bear in mind... and please don't replace the current system with a new one - at most it should be extended...

Regards,
Denny