Lost in hyperspace
Posted on August 14, 2007 by Richard
Filed Under Uncategorized |
- A little less funny, and…
- A lot less technological, while at the same time…
- Pointing out that for all their hacking and weaving, the iPhone wielding architects of the Internet age still can’t do a tenth of what us ‘users’ want.
I was reminded of this watching Matt Mullenweg on Wallstrip. Mullenweg is the baby-faced brain behind Wordpress, the software powering the Interactive Investor blogs and a gazillion others. Here’s the video:
There’s a bit in it where Matt says:
When Wordpress got started in 2003, people said it was too late. Blogging was done, all the software that needed to be there, was there. The market was saturated. Obviously that turned out not to be true.
I’ve got news for you Matt, you haven’t finished yet (I hope). Much as I admire your software and blogs in general, they’re rubbish at talking to each other. I’m talking about comments and trackbacks. Trackbacks differ from comments in that they are responses written on other blogs, excerpted and jumbled up with regular comments on the blog they reference.
I don’t know about you, but it’s hard sometimes to figure out what exactly the trackbacks and comments are referring to, out of context, lined up like bunch of miss-fits in an identity parade at the end of a blog post. Wouldn’t it be great if you could highlight a bit of text on a Web page and comment then and there, or include a paragraph from one blog directly in another?
It turned out would-be users figured this out, years ago. As long ago as sixty-two years ago, but it’s taking the technologists a while to implement it. They’re probably busy fiddling with their iPhones 
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