Lately I've been mulling this idea in my head and trying to visualize how it would look.
The issue(s) are thus: I have this blog here. Its cool. It lets people make comments to my blog entries. But it sucks, because nobody (well, hardly anybody) knows its here. Meanwhile all my friends are on MySpace, which IMHO sucks donkey balls. It would be nice if my blogs here could also be automatically blogs on MySpace, because I am not going to take the time to repost them there.
There are other times I may post something onto a message board, when I want to strike up a discussion (as opposed to just barfing my thoughts onto a blog with no real expectation of a discussion about it). Sometimes I may want that to also be a blog entry, but I'm too lazy to cross post it to my blog. And what happens if I did, and then people make comments to both the blog and the message board posting?
Recently there was a thread on the Knoppmyth message board about a problem I and others were having. The solution was found after a while but it was not clear how to apply it, so I helpfully went through the thread and some other threads and compiled a how-to which I posted onto the knoppmyth wiki.
In my previous blog entry, I mentioned a wiki that had become a rather cluttered looking discussion -- it was more like a message thread, but one that could be edited. It was a mess.
On Slashdot, it occurred to me one day while reading a particularly funny comment to an article that this comment will probably be largely lost to obscurity because you would only ever see it if you read through all the comments for that article.
So taking all these thoughts and putting them together I am lead to the idea of a Grand Unified Bulletin Board System. This would embody all the concepts of message boards (which are the web incarnation of the original BBS's from days gone by..), blogs, wiki's, CMS's, Social Networking, and commentary into a unified mashup.
I haven't figured out how it's all going to work, but trust me, it's going to be cool. And if I don't do it, somebody else will. Hopefully this will be a little easier to do than what scientists face with the Grand Unification Theory.
