So Marc and I are exploring the issues around using two dueling blogs to have a persistent and public dialog about something, and in this case, incestuously, we are discussing that very topic.

Marc Eisenstadt

[from Threadorati - not yet]

this very exercise has brought to light three problems, so here goes:

Problem 1 (my original beef): The Technorati/Feedster/Bloglines 'citations' or 'threadorati' are too indirect, and are inadequate renditions of the ebb and flow of the discussion. The context of the discussion just isn't there: for instance, the 'Threadorati' search for my own entry correctly brought up your commentary, but NOT the permalink, rather the top level of your blog...

Problem 2: The 'contextual quoting' tricks that are both familiar to and trivial for email and forum users are surprisingly klutzy for blog users. At the very least, copy/paste of the relevant entries loses any embedded hyperlinks (I had to manually re-add the ones shown above for Sifry and Weinberger for instance...)

Problem 3:From IE, I in fact couldn't even do an intuitive mouse-drag-copy over the relevant passage of a MoveableType blog - too much (irrelevant) text gets highlighted.

Responses, in order:

1. This is odd. When I look at other technorati searches, like the example shown from Stuart Henshall's Unbound Spiral, the "read full post" is available, which links to the specific blog entry. BUt when I click the threadorati link on the recent entry that Marc commented on, his topmost link is provided, but not the link to the specific entry. I don't understand this, but note that I have a similar and perhaps related problem at Marc's blog: when I try to use the MoveableType bookmarklet (the button embedded in my IE that creates a outline of a MT post) on Marc's My Dog blog, the specific blog entry URL is never captured, but only the topmost URL for the blog. It may be that Marc's blog is not configured correctly for these automated capture tools to grab the permalinks for the individual entries there.
   
2. Yes, its a pain to cut and paste the links embedded in quoted text. You can use the "view source" trick, which helps alot, if you want to retain all links.
   
3. This is a glitch in the Get Real (and other Corante blogs) template, a real pain in the ass. We are moving to a new template for Get Real later this week, which will cure this problem.

And a last point: Marc, it looks like your blog doesn't support trackbacks, which is an obvious crutch for this whole area of interactive discourse. We should be experimenting with two or more blogs that do.

But, leaving aside the specifics, I agree that the threadorati is not what we really want. Something more along the lines of an instant messaging chat room session, where the alternatiing blog entries are serialized, would be better.

Here's the depiction of what I would like to see from a hypothetical "Chaterati":

Of course, it would get more complex it you tried to array the contributions of multiple participants, although, just like in chat, you could just fall back to a sequence without mutliple columns.