Dave proposed a new kind of blog comment system. I agree the process needs to be overhauled but I disagree with some of his ideas. His recommendations are as follows:
1. A fixed commenting period for each post of 24 hours.
2. Until the period expires, none of the comments would be visible to other commenters.
3. You could edit and refine your comments during the period.
4. There would be a length limit of 1000 characters to keep people from using comments in place of a blog post. No one is going to read a blog post in a comment.
5. After the commenting period is over, the comments would become visible, and no further comments would be permitted.
Point 1 presumes everyone boxcars his blog and immediately goes over to his blog to comment on any new post. It goes against the very nature of RSS itself in that people sometimes don’t read these posts until much, later on the order of a week or maybe even month. Perhaps this could be determined via analytics for your particular blog. Also someone may run across his post after a search years later and have something new or relevant to add.
Point 2 Limiting information is so unhelpful.
Point 3 Presumptuous – if you want to edit your comment just re-comment – its the way of the real time web.
Point 4 This is the guy who’s striving for unrestricted twitter message length!!! Yes many comments could be revised and distilled and still get their point across but hey correcting peoples english is best left to others. What if your blog were a force for freedom or emergency messages – capping an extremely important message could have consequences.
Point 5 What??? This is the guy who’s all about the users. Where are the users here – lost in a footnote of history. Shouldn’t he relish constrictive criticism and feedback. Honest feedback is the best thing you can get according to some. I’ll leave it to my commenters to provide the reference.
Twitter is non-conversational? With good tools it’s highly conversational – and lets you step outside the echo chamber. I would argue blog comments should exist like twitter does where your blog serves as the @myblog reply fuction and the concept of trackbacks is further evolved, simplified and integrated. I should be able to look at either a blog or a blog commenting on a blog and piece together the conversation those two had. New tools are needed. Tools which uncork limitations, eliminate the need for moderation because your comments are on your blog no matter which blog you are commenting on.
Update: Also a lot of times on his blog he asks for help to figure out technical problems and gets it… and a back and forth is necessary to get the proper information conveyed. Also he’s tweeting about referrals. Is this just a ploy to get more blogs to link to his to help him rise in the rankings?
Re: 2 I agree he's pushed us off into the fringe where it's harder to maintain/follow connections. I was doing twitter searches on his name @davewiner to see what other people were saying in reply. This works to some degree but degrades over time as other conversations get mixed in.
Re: 4 On a search page twitter itself does now have a show conversation link to show how they are related. Here's a picture of one. This conversation could and did go on for quite a long time. The thing is Dave didn't start a conversation on Twitter so there really is no thread for it. A couple more conversations he had on the topic are here. Twitter may not be the solution but it has elements of the solution.
5. Generally yes but one thing Dave didn't really play to is that some posts get thousands of comments and the noise can be overwhelming. I started looking into solutions to blog comments and found http://aboutecho.com/ But if you look at someone using it (Leo Laporte) look - this post has 1543 "comments".
So I don't know there are complexities here deeper than are apparent at first sight. I think too the ideal solution depends on your blog/followers/your tolerance for pain/your subject. I want my journals peer reviewed but most my blog posts don't need to be. I can manage all my commenters easily. Words that come to mind which could be elements of the solution are threads, forums, crowdsourcing, ranking, weighting. Maybe Dave's blog is at a point where he could get some people to moderate for him. Some of his ideas are great and could spawn whole programs - maybe a forum could handle that coordination better. I feel bad he has to waste his time moderating a bunch of off-topic unhappy irrelevant posts. I mean some of the posts especially if they're long I have a habit of glossing over myself. I'm going to research this a little more and see if I can't find some tools/methodology that could help.
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