Small Thoughts

Jeffrey Zeldman recently made the first post on Happy Cog’s new blog, Cognition. It’s basically a “hello world” post, but two things have a lot of people talking about it. First, the blog has a great design. The other, more interesting thing is that they decided to let Twitter and other people’s blogs host their comments, letting you post to Twitter right from their site and showing all of the tweets in their comments section.

It’s an interesting experiment, and I’m curious to see how it turns out. It could be a new form of TrackBack which, as mccreath said, is a great idea that never really seemed to catch on, and I’d love to see it make a comeback. It is using the web the way it has always worked, linking from one page to another to make a larger conversation. Distribute the conversation instead of keeping it all on one site, then link to it.

It’s tough to tell how Twitter will work for that at this point, since most of the comments on their first article are of the “How does this work?” and “Cool idea!” variety. We’ll see how things look when that has started to wear off.