davidnunez.com

I’m contracting with Pluck in Austin, working on BlogBurst. A large part of my job is reviewing multiple blogs a day for editorial quality and interest.

I’ve come to better understand what I find interesting in other blogs and what I find dreadfully boring.

I think a lot of what I have put in my blog in the past falls into the terribly yawnspirational.

You can categorize blog posts along an axis of “interestingness” or “value” or “quality.” I would roughly scale the types of blog posts like this (with the understanding that most blog articles will not fall cleanly under just one of these categories):

• Quick Posts, links, observations – these are blog posts that might simply point to research found elsewhere (ex. links to an interesting post on another blog) with some commentary. It might also be a picture I took on the way to work. These are usually fast, come often, and very likely do not have much meaningful content content.

• Posts that propose ideas or questions and posts that that show attempts at solving those questions

• “Final” articles that are fully baked – they tend to be longer, come along very rarely and have been edited and publicized, often over multiple versions. My SxSW article is a good example.

There is an element of mental doodling that happens on blogs, but I recognize that most people don’t care about the draft versions of most of the author’s thoughts.

So my intent is to reengineer the blogging and blog reading experience here to account for readers who may only want to read fully built articles.

Here are some assumptions:

• EVERY nugget of content (links, articles, photos, personal journal entries, questions) can potentially spawn other bits of content (or at least have a directed graph relationship with other bits).

• Certain content pieces can be tagged as “questions” or points of “wonder.” These might look like blog posts posing a single thesis.

• Certain other content pieces can be tagged as “research” or “experiments” to answer those questions.

• Certain bits of content can be tagged as “built” or “versions” of an answer to a specific “wonder.”

This requires that I, as an author, can “riff” off of anything I put in my blog. I should build into the authoring software simple buttons that say “riff” which spawn child nodes.

Alternatively, I may be able to build custom tags into the software which allow me to divide articles into specific areas.

As a reader, you should have the option to see what research, questions, and tinkering led to whatever you are currently reading. Furthermore, you should be able to filter away everything but the final “built” articles.

Questions: Can a node have multiple parents? Can a parent have multiple children?