Shelley: Snapshot in Semantic Time: “I also wish more folk would take the time to pull together the threads in a meaningful way like Peter Van Dijck did with the early semantic web discussions.”

We have a long way to go in enabling better conversations with our blogging tools. And better story telling. A blog post now is text and links. That’s good – especially the links. But there are many more structures that we should support, like the semantic web one I did. I had to do that manually. Or like what I was trying to support with XFML: mini structured directories that can link together. There is so much, and microformats are leading some of the way.

Of course, with video it becomes even more urgent. You can’t quote a part of a video right now, except in an experimental tool at Mefeedia. It’s hard to link to videos you like, because you don’t have a thumbnail available, or size information, and you really want to indicate size, type and such when you link. Except at Mefeedia, where I try to make that easier. It’s hard to link videos together in conversations. I’m working on that.

It’s all about mixing the ideas the social research people have about helping people to structure stories and conversations, with the ideas the web people have about web 2.0, you own your data, distribution and such. That mix will make some damn powerful stuff possible. I really hope we can break the wall of big binary video files, and make them more webby. We need that in order to have the kind of conversations blogging has enabled for text.