Blogs and Web 2

The path for blogs to take towards Web 2 is rather tricky and difficult. The most important question to ask is where exactly do we add that extra interactivity in blogs to make them more easier to use and also give them a sexy look.

I would some areas are more likely to made more web 2ish than others. Take for instance the Comments system, the Search, Tagging, Editing, Feeds, and many more like that. I’ll touch upon each and every place that can be AJAXified.

Let me take the Comments System,
Live commenting is something every blog in the future will have not only because it is cool but also really useful for a person who is commenting on your blog. What happens in Live Commenting is that, when a visitor to your blog drops a comment on your post his comment is shown to him in realtime without reloading the page (Ajax Magic!). Well this can be really useful to a great extent, by reducing your bandwidth costs and saving users time to a great extent.

This is pretty common today but I would like to see some more additions in this system so that it becomes more interactive. First of let me introduce you to Nested Commenting and Live Edit. Nested commenting is a concept I am already working upon. What I mean by Nested Commenting is that a person can comment on a user’s comment rather than the post itself. It could be anything for that matter, like argument, supportive or even abusive. Of late I have seen many blogs using a quoting system to achieve this effect. But I would want to see a tree like Comments system so that it shows the interactivity level of a blog. Next things first, I think Live Search is something that we see almost everyday now, but Live Edit for both the Posts and Comments is something that would greatly help the users of a blog.

Up Next is tagging and Feeds
Tagging is something whose heavy use we are going to see in the future. I think Categorizing posts will not be the norm for classifying posts but user specified tags will be used to classify posts in the future and Tagging will also be more flexible for both the readers and the authors. Next is something that has revolutionized the blog world today today. I am talking about Feeds the most happening thing today. Feeds have remained the same ever since its inception. I think it is time for Feeds to be made interactive too. I would like to see a feeds system where in the Feed Reader and the Blog can share data thru XML-RPC. For instance users can comment while reading the post in a feed without visiting the blog, and many more innovations can be taken up. Feedburner has already added some interactivity in the feeds served by them and I think other Feed services should follow suit…