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"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?" Guy de Maupassant

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Improving model of comments for supporting real discussions in weblogs

Wow - this post fell into my news aggregator seconds after my rant on the Radio comments feature !  Hope the guys at Radio are listening.  Thanks Marc!

JournURL. JournURL: More BBS/Blog Fusion. Another entry in the fusion of the BBS and Blog patterns, JournURL, an attempt to create a CCMS (that'd be Community Content Management System to you and me.) The focus here is improving on the model of simple comments for supporting real discussions in weblogs: "Robust threaded and linear discussion that encourages extended conversations and debate. No simplistic comment system here, folks. No anonymous spam."

JournURL recently launched a way to use its comments system from 3rd party blogging tools:

As I've said in the past, blog comment systems generally suck. They're fine for "me too" responses and the occasional one-liner, but they quickly show their limitations when put to the task of managing large, intense discussions. ... Meanwhile, here I am, sitting on what is probably the most robust, blog-friendly discussion app anywhere, and all of those people out there using Movable Type and similar apps can't take advantage of it. ... I've decided to see what I can do to make this thing more useful to people using "foreign" blogging apps. Enter ping2talk. ...

[Corante: Social Software]

Roger Benningfield has appeared on the ThreadsML list and showed us all his JournURL. I wonder if he knows that Steve Yost is about to unveil QucikTopic Pro -with QuickThread - the first implementation of ThreadsML?  JournURL would be cool to be teh second product to support ThreadsML.  Then we could......

[Marc's Voice]

1:25:52 PM    comment []  trackback []

Radio Comments Feature

The comments feature on Radio really needs some doing up.  Adding trackback is altogether another thing - i can't wait for that to happen.

My cribs :

  • you can't edit a comment you have posted in response to others' comments at your own blog
  • you can't delete comments - which is fine and democratic - but what happens when some nasty bag is out there simply being nasty and not constructive in any way
  • this is my biggest crib - Radio does not inform you of new comments added to your posts - this really sucks because you might lose out interesting threads - really defeats the purpose of engaging in conversations.  It happened to me today when i, by sheer chance, scrolled down my homepage and saw several new and really interesting comments from Rob and Martin and Avi.  What happens too - when the post drops off the front page. 

Ugh!



1:17:32 PM    comment []  trackback []