Earlier in the week I posted my take on Amy Gahran's "I Wish Blog Comments Were Easier to Follow. After reading some of the comments and her follow-up posts I've done a little brainstorming. Here's what features I'm guessing people might like to see in next-generation "conversational media" software:

1) Each posting begins a conversation. If you want to take an existing conversation in a different direction or you want to start a new conversation, then you would start a new post (let's call it a node). Otherwise, you would add to an exiting node.

2) Additional data/information can be added to a node. Maybe a node requires some photos or graphics to explain it better? What about a map? Here's a good place to include citations and/or links to items outside your blog that inspired you to start the conversation.

3) Comments are handled in a threaded forum. Each node gets its own forum or discussion group. Automatically. With moderation capabilities (ala Slashdot).

4) The top-level node of the conversation becomes a summary page. Many feed readers only look at initial blog posts, ignoring the comments. But, many feed readers will (or can be configured to) re-read posts that are updated. Amy setup a separate feed for comments, but not everyone will subscribe, and comments are not closely tied to the original conversation. Having the node actually be a summary of the conversation, including (all or selected) comments, would cause feed readers to see the updated content. I've seen a few bloggers do this manually... editing their post with selected comments and updates as they learn more about the original topic from the comments flowing in. This would fix Amy's second concern... and maybe the first one too.

5) Track changes to the post. Keep versions of the node... like a wiki. A lot of people use blog posts as a reference. It would be convienient to see the history of the conversation. Perhaps this could be a separate related page that would be created at the touch of a button for any given node. Let's call this one the "What I've learned after I started this conversation" page.

6) Offer an overview page for each node. Call this one a "conversational map". It would include the references to external web content (as mentioned above), selected comments (perhaps with a threaded tree-like graphic display), and the like. If a standard format for this map was adopted across blogging platforms, you could include links to "branches" of the conversation that occur on other people's sites. This part needs a bit of thinking still, but I can see something like this addressing Amy's third concern.

Hmmm... this is looking a lot like a blog + a forum + Flickr.com + Google/Yahoo maps + Wikipedia.org + thought maps. Hey, why not throw some video into the mix. :) Most definitely a "hard problem"... and a great challenge to develop. If the resulting system were implemented to be as easy to use as today's blogging software, I can see it being widely useful.

What I'm envisioning can be summed up as a way for the initiator to become a facilitator and note-taker for the conversation that ensues (whoa... shades of status meetings!).

Comments? Suggestions? Too complex?

Update 2006/01/08: There's a community based site that has added a Wiki companion to their local news site. Check out it out at ToledoTalk.com.