Sam Ruby has quietly released his latest essay Cohesion. His essay describes some of the currently popular techniques used to promote collaboration and group forming via weblogs.
Sam identifies three major approaches (TrackBack, PingBack and Automatic LinkBacks) and briefly discusses their uses in remote comments, creating two directional hypertext links and ridiculously easy group forming.
As is commonly the case, I agree with Sam's assessment. One area where I do give pause is in the phrase via weblogs.
There is no doubt this is the most common (perhaps only for the moment) use of these techniques, but I don't believe they are limited to weblogs. At least weblogs in the tradition sense. For instance, what of wikis? How could they benefit from such techniques? Perhaps I getting ahead of myself, but its a valid area of thought to explore at some point.
Sam also raises an issue I failed to mention in my previous post on the topic -- I'll call it reasonable scalability. Sam writes:
Some attempts to visualize [two directional hypertext links such as TrackBack] have tried to impose a hierarchical organization on what essentially is bidirectional, quite possibly cyclic, graph. To date, it appears that this data is too dynamic and distributed to be displayed as such in a static manner except possibly when limited to a single level of depth. A single level of depth also helps the dynamic implementations as it increases responsiveness and doesn't attempt to impose a hierarchy.
Ben Hammersley's experiment with TrackBack threading and MLTFO also illustrates this point.
For all those interested in this topic, I encourage you to join the ucapi-discuss mailing list. Questions by those seeking enlightenment are also welcomed. ;)
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