Flow applications embrace the conversation slightly better because they allow conversational artifacts to more easily collect in natural ways. It was only a matter of time before the idea of “Blogging 2.0” made its appearance. In a recent post by Duncan Riley (The Changing Blogosphere and Blogging 2.0), he accurately underscores the revolution that is taking place – conversations are moving away from blogs (specifically business blogs) as content consumers attempt to participate [more] in the conversational aspects of the blogosphere. I don’t believe this shift is intentional; rather, it’s simply the market of content consumers (and providers) voting for better interaction and conversational services. If anything, it underscores why Twitter has grown so quickly and why other services such as Ping.FM have emerged. In my view, Blogging 2.0 could (and possibly should) be called “Flow 1.0”. Stowe Boyd helped me get along with this thinking where he said … “So, larger numbers of blog refugees exist, who read blogs in RSS tools or are alerted to interesting stories and conversations in these flow apps, and comment there, into a minority of what once was the greater community of participants.” – Stowe Boyd (Blogging 2.0 Meme Doesn't Go Far Enough)
Stowe takes it a bit further suggesting that the very fabric of the blogosphere is being challenged by the movement of information within windows of time – i.e., through “flow” applications such as FaceBook, Tumblr, and Twitter. "In this model, everything has become disconnected, everything is principally in the flow. The absolute address of any post, or comment, or vote, is irrelevant. And posts and other atrifacts may be copied with appropriate reference back to the original author, and some means to get to a URL, but only as a way to represent an identity."
Blogging itself represents reverse chronological publishing – it is indeed a flow of sorts, but it’s typically a half-duplex (unilateral flow). In 1999 it was a revolutionary idea to publish content in this manner, but humans embraced it because a flow creates a time-centric process that people can easily relate to. Flow applications embrace the conversation slightly better because they allow conversational artifacts to more easily collect in natural ways. Ironically, in this comment, Jos Schuurmans equates the emergence of social networks with the end of “channels”. Conclusion… Blogging 1.0 was great; commenting… not so useful. Flow applications; a natural extension of commenting that enhances the conversation and will dramatically impact the emergence of Blogging 2.0. Note to Self… Blogging 2.0 Requirements - Integration (inbound and outbound) with flow applications.
- Inviting flow application users to comment on specific posts related to recent flow-based conversations.
- Search technologies that leverage the data in flow applications.
- Social media embrace including search, syndication (inbound and outbound).
Two things we did when we designed the MyST Platform™ was to ensure that (i) comment objects be treated as first class citizens in the common scheme of the content sphere, and (ii) that comments could represented by an abstract association with any other information objects. This gives us the agility to meet the new Blogging 2.0 requirements with ease. | 
