(From http://k0s.org/blog/20080305234845)

Collaborative Documents and Discussions the Web 2.0 Way

*or*

why bitsyblog is not a blog

Some of the web is static content.  There's much less of this now 
comparitively
than than 
there was ten years ago, and it increasingly serves as help and explanation, 
forms and guidelines than as content that people actually seek out.
What people care about is what a site's contributors (an increasingly
wider base) put on the web.  

This content falls into essentially two kinds of documents:  there are
documents that are meant to be definative exposees of an idea, and
there are conversations had between multiple people.  

The first, which
I'll term collaborative documents, were traditionally done by passing
a disk around, editting with a (generally bad) editor, and passing to
the next person.  With the advent of wiki, collaborative documents
have become much more convenient and tied to the information age
(lord, I can't believe I used that term).  A wiki may (and usually do)
keep track of revision information, but this is ancilliary to the
purpose of collaborative documents:  building an information base
about the subject considered.  The ability to create other linked
documents is essential to the structure.

Discussions can take many forms:  mailing lists, blog posts and
comments, and discussion forums are a few of the most prolific on the
web.  But regardless applied to the label, the format is the same.
Whether through email, through a web form, or through conceivably an
SMS message, someone starts a discussion.  Others are free to reply to
it (or comment on it), or comment on other peoples comments.  The
emergent document is a tree of authors and their replies.

Both collaborative documents and discussions have slowly pushed back
at the limitations of the traditional technologies, but they have not
eclipsed them.  Mailing list discussions still do not equal blog
posts.  Google documents has finally broken the barrier to allow
multiple people to edit the same collaborative document, but this is
still "cutting edge" and isn't really done in a way that really takes
advantage of what wiki -- or the internet at large -- has to offer.
Going forward to what the internet is becoming, these requirements
won't just be common .  They will be essential, to the point of
becoming banal when they become the meme.

The best thing about communications is how quickly old standards are
brought down in favor of new emergent ways of working with
information.

Which is why bitsyblog is not a blog.  It is literally a web-log, but
'blog has come to mean so much more;  namely, some sort of blog-space
where people can comment, keep profiles, and exchange information in
ways that transcend just writing "Everything written in python is
horrible. I ate a piece of toast today." for all to glance on
passive.  There is no conversation with bitsyblog.  This is by design,
the idea being that commenting will (someday I hope) be done with
middleware.  But that's besides the point.  bitsyblog is a monologue.
The time of monologues is passed.  The time for interaction is now.