Having been an engineer and designer for most of my career, I often find myself trying to explain to others why I am so passionate about software, and in particular, why I believe that understanding something about architecture is fundamental to anyone who makes decisions related to technology, and that choice of one design pattern over another can dramatically impact outcome. Decisions such as centralized versus decentralized, hierarchical versus cellular, RPC versus MQ, API versus protocol, structured versus semi-structured, etc., are so very critical to understand in order to make an informed choice. At the technology level, at the business level, architecture matters.
Over the years, I've been either a participant or a lurker on countless systems hosting public discussion forums - starting in the mid 70's at PLATO, but continuing with The Well, Echo, The Source, CompuServe, Prodigy, Usenet, Fidonet, eGroups, and many others. And one thing has been a fact of life: that hand-in-hand with public discussion comes spamming, flaming, and other dysfunction that in large part progressively decreased the signal-to-noise ratio of any long-standing topic.
Much study has been given to this topic, and although the most effective solution seems to have been human-moderated discussions, many creative folks have attempted to combat the problem with techniques such as community ranking and other such reputation systems. From my vantage point, I'd long accepted that dealing with "noise" is just something that goes with the territory in public forums.
And then came blogs.
(Pardon me if I'm simply rediscovering something that has been well-covered elsewhere, but it's truly fascinating to me.)
Over the past few months, I've lurked around a broad variety of blogs, trying to figure out in my own mind what exactly was going on, and watching others as they discovered the medium: trying to understand where and when to tag items and use permalinks, exploring the use of referrals as reverse-engineered backlinks, and experimenting the use of aggregation techniques to apply centralized organization to a decentralized web of activity. It has been truly fascinating for me, and, as discussed elsewhere, I realized that I would only truly learn if I joined into the fray.
But what has struck me over the past few weeks is the fact that blogs represent a radical new approach to public discussion - one that, in essence, completely and naturally "solves" the signal:noise problem, and does so through creative exploitation of a unique architecture based upon decentralized representation of discussion threads. Let me elaborate.
In traditional discussion, topics and their responses are contained and organized within a centralized database. The relationship between topics and responses is generally maintained in a manner specific to the nature of the database - that is, in newsgroups the messages might be related by Message-ID hyperlinks or crudely by title, in Notes they are related by the $REF hyperlink, and so on. Summary-level "views" are generated through database queries. And that has been the general architectural design pattern of public discussions for quite some time.
But blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog "posts a topic", others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink. This goes on and on, back and forth. In essence, it's the same hyperlinking mechanism as the traditional discussion design pattern, except that the topics and responses are spread out all over the Web. And the reason that it "solves" the signal:noise problem is that nobody bothers to link to the "flamers" or "spammers", and thus they remain out of the loop, or form their own loops away from the mainstream discussion. A pure architectural solution to a nagging social issue that crops up online.
The downside? Well, part of why people like getting together is that unintended consequences can be quite rewarding. And there's a danger that the self-selecting environment of a given blogging community might limit unintended outcomes. But, then again, I could argue quite the opposite: in a traditional public discussion, a good idea might get lost in the noise.
The bottom line: architecture matters, and we've yet to discover the limits of where this fascinating medium will take us.
