I've never "missed" a diary entry. Whenever I get the hankering to read the pithy (or not so pithy) thoughts of my fellow k5'ers I started surfing around, moving pack and forth in time, clicking on links, and handles, and sigs, and general wandering until I find something good.
However, I think a more generalized concept of subscriptions or watches would be awesome!
Most weblogs are very linear, and temporal.(hence the name weblog) If a story falls off the frontpage of most weblogs, nobody ever sees it again. If you come late to the party, give up hope of anybody seeing your comments, or answering your questions. The story might as well be mothballed.(which is exactly what slashdot does with its old comments)
K5 has a real chance (and, I think, a vested interest) in being less linear. I've visited k5 off and on for a while now (could it be a year?) but only recently threw myself into reading it daily, commenting, moderating, participating.
Jumping around over the last several months I found many intersting stories and comments to comment on. But I've quickly realized that nobody is going to wade back, 30 comments at a time, to see if somebody replied to a post they made several months ago.
I think it would really take k5 as a discussion forum to a whole new level if you could choose to be notified whenever someone responded to one of your postings.
Okay enough soft stuff, whats the idea?
Add subscriptions, or watches, to scoop. Define a set of events about which a user can choose to be notified in order to keep up with the ever changing state of the website.
What would fire off an event? An action take on an object that the user is watching. What does that mean? A story in the submission queue is an object that the author watches by default. When its is posted or hidden the author is notified by email.
Other events could be a user that you are "watching" publishing a diary entry or a story, somebody responding to a comment you posted (or responding in a thread that a comment you posted sparked), a new comment on a story you're watching (think hotlists), etc.
And notification doesn't have to be an email, it can simply be a note, that shows up in a personal notifications box that you see whenever you come to k5. This is NightHawk's "You have 3 new diary entries waiting.
But wait you're saying, that sounds like a lot of computation, and activity. Wouldn't it destory kuro5hin to do all this stuff everytime somebody publishes a comment? Probably. But this stuff doesn't need to be done in real time, its can be done asyncronously. In fact, if you've got an extra box lieing around, you can push over a copy of the database every 30 minutes or so and do all the analysis, and event creation totally offline, and then report back to the k5 server with a list of notifications that need to happen.
Not sure if this makes any sense. And I'm not sure if anybody will ever see this (as it is no longer the newest of stories :) But I think it would be damn cool, and I would love some feedback! Might just submit it as its one story after I've had more then 10 minutes to think about it, or if I get some good feedback.
kellan
