Monday August 4

blogs as forums

In a comment on my blog, somebody referred to my site as a "forum". My first thought was, "This isn't a forum, it's just my blog." But then it occurred to me that blogs really have become forums. The sad thing about this is that people are participating in threads on many blogs at once, and there is no unifying tool to keep them on top of all these threads at once.

It would be nice if there was a tool that allowed me to post comments, get alerts when threads I am active in have new comments, and keep a history of all the threads I have commented in. In other words, something like a Usenet client for blogs.

Is there such a tool? Maybe one of those apps like NetNewsWire can do this. It would also be nice if there were a universal blogging standard (Echo?) that provided a server API for client applications to implement this functionality.