“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on…”
That’s how most of our conversations on the Web can be described; even those that seem most important at the time get lost in the past as new ones take their place. But how often do you find yourself wishing you could find those gems that you or someone else posted way back when?
For those of us who are part of many communities involved in countless conversations going back for years or even decades, the idea of having a personal archive of valuable exchanges seems like a natural. This topic made for an interesting post by John Tropea on the Library Clips blog. He titled the article Distilling Conversations, but it was about more than that. He brings in some quotes from Nancy White, Brad Hinton and Joitski Hulsebosch who all have considered the problem.
A lot of people write these types of blog posts, just like I am doing now, right now I am reviewing/collating/distilling a discussion, but I’m doing it in my regular blog, which means my review of the conversation will just be again buried in the archives. I could use a tag/category called “discussion summary”, but even better is Joitske’s idea of using a “discussion summary blog” for just this type of content…where each blog post summarises a discussion into a neat package.
And in a comment related to my activities on Presilience, John describes the application of such a process in the realm of climate change and sustainability.
Imagine an internal blog that distilled conversations (from blogs, email, forums, etc…) on “climate change
”, and another dedicated to “sustainable living”, and another on “green enterprise”, and perhaps these blogs were all listed on a wiki gateway page.
Hi Cliff, fun to read this, I came across it while playing with whostalkin? (tool to track conversations). You were the first person to mention blogs to me in the cpsquare foundations workshop! Is this your blog?