In his post What is a blogchain? Horst Gutmann posits that:
" ... making a post part of a chain is an explicit action ... But what would happen, if we don't do that explicit step? This would also allow us to not only have a single parent-child path but one involving multiple parents, just as multiple thoughts can come together to form a new one."
He writes about creating a blog-graph rather than a blog-chain. It took me back to the idea of pathways and journeys through the blog.
Some kind of visual presentation of threads, especially in a social context, has been on my mind since the Google+ days – a means of depicting the spread of a conversation and the conversation itself in a graph-like manner. Horst's thinking translates this to the ongoing conversation with yourself AKA the blog.
It's someting I was already considering in some form so as to aid with those pathways and journeys, although not quite so elegantly.
The complexity a full map would require is currently beyond me but I can implement the first steps. I wondered, "what would it look like if my 'Start Here' page showed onward links from the posts it displays?" Now, the links are all available within the full post text but would if be useful to pull them out into a simple list for quick reference? So that's what I've been working on.
It's not amazingly pretty (I'm iterating the design) but it helps to add a bit of structure to things. Is this the best place to do it? It's as good as any. Does it do what I set out to achieve? At a (very) basic level, it provides the beginnings of a path (two levels deep now) – somewhere to start exploring things in a couple of different ways.
