(6:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Proposed New Blogging System

à Gauche: This is the kind of conversation that might be best served by the A. K. Institute for Advanced Intertextual Studies. I mean the forum- or electronic format-to-come, in which interested parties will contribute freely without limitations on space (1000 characters), in which there will be a viable footnote function, in which relevant google searches will bring participants from every nation and discipline. As they say, "Viens, oui, oui." [Come, amen, amen.]

Adam Kotsko: So you're saying you want me to pay for an upgraded comment function?

Anthony Smith: I'd like a footnote system for blogging as well, oh and the ability to put in proper diacritical marks so we can write Zizek and a Gauche properly.

à Gauche: Not pay, just learn how to or befriend someone who can invent a sexy new system. [...] I'd like to see a blog that dispensed with the sidebar and blogroll and instead had 2-3 parallel columns for posting, Glas-style. And an essay-only format (no fluff posts, like I tend to write). And Pete can contribute artwork. And with some minimal advertising and such, we could eventually bill it as an online journal. I nominate myself Contributing Editor of Salacious Revelry.

Cap'n Pete: [...] And absolutely on the group sight. What if there was just a blog sight that everyone knew the password to. Everyone is free to blog and post and comment right there on the site. Call it pundits or pedants or postmodern punditical pedantry, postmaternal paternal man back to that electra, oedipus stuff. Maybe you were right kotsko.

Adam Kotsko: The problem is that fluff posts seem to generate the most discussion (take Atrios, who writes almost nothing but fluff posts) -- blogging is an inherently ephemeral artform, and in any case, reading stuff on the screen still sucks.

Still, a basically good idea, and a worthy project if we all fail to get into the appropriate graduate programs. [...] We could become the McSweeney's of the blogosphere.

I think this warrants some more rigorous fantasizing. I would propose keeping the following features, roughly modelled after the Movable type system:

• Permalinks: That is, I would like each post to be its own separate page. This would fit in well with à Gauche's desire for longer, more substantive posts. The "click here to read more" thing, frequently employed by Crooked Timber and John and Belle, also seems to be a valuable feature.
  
• Comments: No character limits -- let's turn every post into a potential full-blown academic conference. A nice wrinkle would be a system parallel to Word's group collaboration features, whereby a particular comment could be linked in the text itself (e.g., I make a factual error in a particular paragraph, and the comment pointing it out is linked directly to the paragraph in question, instead of the author having to clumsily point out the location of the error). Permalinks for individual comments would be necessary, along the lines of a Blogger permalink style.
  
  

  An added wrinkle: The comment composition window could have the full text of the article in question in a column alongside, with instructions to select particular text to add comments when applicable. This would give commenters greater ownership of the site; perhaps the dangers inherent in this could be diluted through a registration process. Links to reader comments could appear in a different color from normal links.

In terms of page layout, I think it would be good to have approximately four columns. One of them (perhaps it could vary with each update of the page) would consist of recommended links: one of the contributors could link to a relevant article and blogpost, including a brief quote from the article and a brief comment about why it's important. This would maintain the all-important linking function that makes blogs so useful as guides to the Internet. Comments on these posts would be unnecessary, since any and all comments could be directed to the bloggers linked. I suggest that we could just let these fall off the bottom of the page once they're scrolled to death -- no need to have permanent links to ephemera.

The remaining three columns would be for the more substantive articles. These would be of varying length, and may or may not take advantage of the "click here to read more" feature. The latest three would be across the top tier, the fourth through sixth latest on the second tier, etc. To keep it postmodern, however, the tiers would not have a fixed height, so that essays of varying length would mean that articles separated by a variety of lengths of time would be juxtaposed, more or less at random, as the page was updated. In addition, it might be nice if the top three posts were placed in random order across every time something new was added.

Footnotes could be handled by using the "a title" tag with a snippet of the footnote, to let the reader know if she actually needs to read it. Clicking the link to the footnote would bring up a smaller window similar to comment windows, containing the full text. This could allow the author to keep the body text itself free of links and provide documentation only to those who are genuinely interested (thus getting rid of the "decorative link" syndrome).

Artwork could be added in gaps between articles, sometimes extending across multiple columns, and it could be permalinked as well. A permanent masthead, rather than a sidebar, could link to profiles of the contributing editors at large, with appropriate titles (Adam Kotsko: Dictator for Life; Robb Schunemann: First Tiger; etc.). A search function would have to be prominently displayed as well.

I don't know much about the technical end of it, not being privy to the various programming languages used on the web, but clearly generating the front page would be a technical challenge. The comment feature that I envision might also be difficult, since it allows commenters to edit the HTML of the posts, though not their content.

In terms of editor improvements, we can tackle Anthony's request for diacritical marks: in the Blogger window, it would be a fairly simple task to add little buttons for umlats, circumflex accents, etc., or to design uniform standards for keyboard shortcuts, as in Microsoft Word. Failing that, fire up Character Map, which is, according to Kamala the Ugandan Giant, the best feature on most computers. A more full-featured post editor (something along the lines of Word or emacs) would definitely help. Authors being able to choose their own fonts without resorting to raw HTML, or basically being able to do anything without resorting to raw HTML, would be wonderful. (If I were designing this program, too, I would try to make sure that it didn't generate ugly HTML like Word does -- a font tag before every word, etc.)

So now all of you can use the primitive, inadequate comment feature of this page to add in your own blogging fantasies. If anyone wants to volunteer to implement some of this technology, even just pieces of it (such as the advanced comment feature), then obviously that would be the best of all possible worlds. I know Melinda (nein09) has developed her own blogging software, so maybe that could provide the basis for a more advanced version. Something based on Movable Type (is it open source?) could also prove to be worthwhile.

Even if this comes to nothing, it's only marginally less productive than fantasizing about what foreign languages I'm going to learn this week and what books I'm going to systematically read and master ("This week, I'll learn Homeric Greek and read the Iliad and the Odyssey, which will provide a good foundation for...").

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