Tuesday November 25, 2025; 1:06 PM EST
I'm starting to work on my new discourse system. I've been waiting to do this for a while, until all the pieces I needed were there, and they have been for a couple of months. I'll tell you about it as it starts to come into view. #- The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don't have to "go" to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.#
- A comment is not in any way guaranteed space on the other person's blog. Thus the spam incentive that all other comment systems have is not here. I think that's a huge part of the problem, and it's neatly solved. #
- And the people I imagine who will be appearing in my space are the kind of people that used to get quoted on my mail pages, in the ancient pre-silo web. Doc Searls is #1 on this list, he was a perfect contributor to the mail pages. He understood the idea before he even heard it. That was how quickly he grok'd this stuff. Same way my mother understood blogging, no one had to explain it to her, she already knew. I think NakedJen will be a fantastic contributor in this mode, and we won't need Facebook to tie us together. #
- See, I already know the people I want to come to the party and the place I want to party. I just have to get the electricity working, the usual things you need, plumbing, heat, etc. #
- In the future if you have a comment on this now relatively long post, you'll click on an icon, write your comment, publish it, with almost no overhead. You won't have to "go" anywhere to do that. It'll be right there where you're reading, just like a twitter-like system. But unlike Twitter commenting, our not-so-tiny full-featured text box will let you write, for crying out loud, instead of dealing with a programmer's idea of how you should write. I want all my writing features on my blog, and dammit, when I write a comment too. Why should the comment editor be any different from the regular editor, and why can't all my comments, everywhere, be readable on my blog. See how we're making a web here? It's not hard, you just have to keep factoring. Never stop. #
- How many different ways do I have to write? One. Just one. But I should have choice, because not everyone loves the same kind of editor. The web is about choice, pretty much everywhere. It doesn't matter what software people use because it's all done with open formats and protocols, every part replaceable. Small pieces loosely joined. In other words we'll be using the web. #