CJ Eller: CJ: I don't know really. I suppose it reads like a chat system in reverse y'know? You just have to scroll down to see the past conversation. The real activity will be happening on the blog post itself. If anyone wants to go to the channel and connect a block they totally could.
CJ Eller: CJ2: Yeah that makes sense. It's not supposed to be read from Are.na but on the blog post right? Only the other collaborator will read from here and add blocks. Because then you can see what you're responding to right there. The blog for reading and Are.na for writing/responding/connecting blocks.
CJ Eller: CJ: Exactly! And I do enjoy the idea of having each block being content-addressable if you really want to focus on a particular part of the chat. That's what every interview/conversation should have built in.
CJ Eller: CJ2: I agree with you there. Maybe each block of the interview could be linked to the original block? On second thought that might be a bit overwhelming. Maybe just linking to the Are.na channel would be okay as a start.
CJ Eller: CJ: Let's see if it will update. I just connected the code to a Glitch app.
CJ Eller: CJ2: I think it just did.
CJ Eller: CJ: Cool!
CJ Eller: CJ2: Yeah, let's try one more time to see if it works in the post.
CJ Eller: CJ: Actually, can you try it while the app is closed out? That way we can see if it really works.
CJ Eller: CJ2: IT WORKS!
CJ Eller: CJ: Awesome!
CJ Eller: CJ2: Alright, so I think this might be ready to try out for real then. Might be cool to share with a person or two and see how it works.
CJ Eller: CJ: Yeah that's a good idea. Maybe we can grab people that already have an Are.na account?
CJ Eller: CJ2: Great plan. I might have a couple people in mind.
CJ Eller: CJ: Sounds good!
CJ Eller: CJ2: Just want to test again to make sure the Glitch app is updating. Even if it isn't every minute at least to see if it works without going to the app directly. I want to make it at least run in the background.
Jared Pereira: Jared: Rendering are.na to websites is hella cool! I'm really digging the API gluing methodology here. Is the Glitch app always running and fetching from are.na or are there webhooks or something?
I do like the flow on Kicks' blgochat where you have to actually go look at the other persons page to see if anything's been posted. It has a really nice cadence and 'checking the mail' vibes to it.
Jared Pereira: Jared: Rendering are.na to websites is hella cool! I'm really digging the API gluing methodology here.
CJ Eller: CJ: Yep! The Glitch app is checking every minute. I have a scheduler in my Python framework to run a function that grabs the Are.na channel and updates the post. It would be a lot easier to do this with a webhook kind of thing but I honestly haven't looked into yet. I am sure it's possible to could create something in Glitch or elsewhere that would perform that webhook functionalty.
CJ Eller: CJ: Though honestly I think Glitch sleeps your apps every 5 minutes so you need a web cron service that sends an http request to the app, waking it up so that it can work. Might be a little inefficient but it does the trick. Kind of goes towards the idea of stitching your personal web ecosystem with API's and little apps that I love to do.
Brendan Schlagel: Brendan: Hello! Joining the blog chat…I guess I have to preface w/ my name manually here huh?
This seems neat and I'm wondering a) how realtime this might be in terms of feeling more like chat vs. long-running forum convo (and published immediately or at some point once it hits a critical conversational mass); b) if this sort of thing might work as a comments section alternative, or sort of a way to annotate a “main” text (blog post or otherwise); and c) what sort of audience dynamic this could be best suited for, e.g. intentionally limited to a core small group of participants, or potentially open to anyone, and whether it's more a semi-private chat or publicly available forever, etc.
CJ Eller: CJ: Hey Brendan! Yeah, you have to preface your name at the moment. Was thinking of doing something fancy with using the Are.na API to grab someone's name but thought that might make it a little less lightweight. Might not be too difficult to do though. Let me address those those three questions though...
A) It can be as real-time as you want it to be! Like I told Jared earlier, this runs on a Glitch app that activates via a scheduler/cron-job. The app runs every 2 minutes but could be for every hour if we wanted to. That aspect could be experimented with further. I like the idea of finding a middle-ground between a blogchain and a chatroom, so maybe more on the longer side would be interesting.
B) This could definitely be a comment section alternative. I guess it would mean that people need an Are.na account to participate, unless Are.na has a channel setting where anyone can contribute to it. This reminds me of Utterances, a light-weight commenting system that runs on Github issues. Trojan horsing comments into a blog by means other than an official commenting system is super fascinating to me. Having it as an annotation system would also be great. Honestly there could be other ways to incorporate it that I am not thinking of.
C) Originally I thought about using blogchats how Kicks Condor used blogchats – as a one-to-one “interview” format that was displayed publicly. It's a way to exchange ideas that's a little more lightweight and easier than inviting someone in a blogchain. The conversation can happen at anyone's pace and can be to the point. Adding more than two people to a blogchat would be interesting to see, but I wonder if opening it up to everyone would be a bit chaotic. Could be worth a shot though.
Brendan Schlagel: Brendan: Sweet! Yeah kind of fun just as an ongoing conversation space. But feels like it could be particularly suited to a specific live discussion, say commentary on a performance or live conference talk or something. I do also like the original use case of a specific planned conversation (“interview” or otherwise), where maybe there are some initial goals / parameters defined upfront, or at least the participants agree when it's in some sense “complete”, so it feels less like an indefinite chat, and more a contained published piece, just generated in a more conversational way.
CJ Eller: CJ: I didn't even think of the live conversation idea. That would be awesome in small little discussion circles. And yeah, the idea of making it part ongoing conversation and part published work is why I latched onto the blogchat idea in the first place. It seemed at once organic and contained. I could imagine people creating a whole post together. Maybe not attributing each person like we are now but creating each paragraph to create a (hopefully) uniform blog post.