I started wondering on Friday how many people respond to something I write, but I never see them because Userland wipe my referrer logs at 5pm AEST every day—If I don't check them while I'm still at work, I'll never see who's linking to me. They're stored on the server somewhere, I seem to recall, but I can't remember the URL.

A good weblog post doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's either a contribution to an ongoing conversation or it's an attempt to initiate a new conversation. Even when a post is just a link to an article, there's an implicit “what do you guys think?” there. What I would love to see is an easy, efficient way to graph and follow these conversations.

The web solution to this are services like blogdex or protocols like trackback, which graft relationships between blog entries onto the web pages. These are nice enough, but they require some work to follow, and the more a conversation branches, the more work it is for someone trying to follow it.

My initial, really vague idea was this. Think of it in terms of Instant Messaging. You are a member of a cloud. When you post a blog entry it gets intercepted, and for each URL you have linked to in your post, you join a ‘channel’ devoted to that URL. The channel is notified of the contribution you have just made to the conversation about that URL. Thus, as the conversation progresses, each contributor can follow the activity in the channels. Close, but needs polish.

Then, I suddenly realised. Wow, I've finally found an interesting application for Javaspaces. Create a Tuple Space. Every time you post a blog entry, you put it into the space, along with a bunch of linking objects that point to any other URL you referenced in your post. Clients could traverse the conversations in the space, ask for event notifications if a new reference is made to a post, et. al. Leasing would ensure the space culled conversations that nobody was referring to any more.

I wish I wasn't so damn busy over the next few weeks...