Unquiet

I while ago I wrote about a concept of mine I called ‘[ComeBack][cb]’, based on the idea of bringing my own comments on other people’s sites back to my own:

>What if there were some sort of tool that allowed me to comment on other people’s blogs and have my comments appear as ‘comebacks’ on my site? In essence, it would work by me telling my own blog that I posted a comment somewhere and my blog confirming that it was really me, then posting the comment on my own as a mini-entry.

With the recent launch of [coComment][cc], this idea comes closer to reality; however, in the coComment model, the problem is one of centralisation… coComment tracks your comments on other people’s sites, but it does so by using a central server, a single entity that could disappear along with all that comment data and the relationships between sites. Bob Aman over at Sporkmonger [says it well][1]:

> Centralization almost always loses if decentralization can be done elegantly and effectively.

He also notes that there’s an obvious demand for the ability to track your comments elsewhere… There are whole companies [based on the idea][2] of ‘identity aggregation’ and coComment’s model (as well as ComeBack) stems from the problem of _identity fragmentation_: Our efforts in separate communities for the most part remain separate despite the fact we, as individuals, consist of all these efforts. So our blog exists as one of our identities, our email another, our comment-streams on other blogs become multiple identities.

I should note here that I’m more a fan of information aggregration - of bringing as much possible information as possible into a single structured space with multiple views - rather than information specialisation - segmenting information into discrete spaces, as a friend of mine seems to be doing now as he launches [2 new blogs][3]. I’m interested in coherence of identity, in answering the question ‘who is Jacob Stetser and what’s important to him?’ than in coherence of subject - which Michal rightly notes works better in terms of building an audience (as well as improving search engine results and Google Ad revenues!)

To me, there are two problems inherent in our modern levels of information production and information consumption:

1. The information we produce fills too many separate silos - how do we keep track of our own identity?
2. The information we consume arrives in too many different ways - how do we keep track of it all?

ComeBack is a partial solution to the first problem, bringing pieces of our identity back into our space and in the process expanding the potential audience of web-based conversations to our own ‘audience’ - the people who read our blogs and know us well.

I envision the actual implementation of ComeBack to be a combination of OpenID-style authentication, globally-unique identifiers for every comment, and RSS… all packaged up in a nice plugin for Typo or WordPress, and/or comment aggregation/identity services similar to coComment.

Over the next few weeks I’d like to work up a better description and initial specification for ComeBack - interested parties are welcome to contact me!

[cb]: http://blog.unquiet.net/archives/2005/05/22/comeback-kid/
[cc]: http://www.cocomment.com/
[1]: http://sporkmonger.com/articles/2006/02/13/decentralized-commenting
[2]: http://suprglu.com/glufactory
[3]: http://cashflowblogging.com/2006/02/the-blog-work-cycle