Enhancing the ability to comment

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I’m sure this isn’t a new or revolutionary idea, but here goes anyway: Am I the only one who thinks it isn’t as easy at it should be to jot down a comment on a posting on someone’s blog? I think there is definitely a barrier there in existing blogging and news aggregator platforms. And yes, I understand that in a way, a barrier is good because it protects from spamming.

What if, in the news aggregator of your choice, when you are reading a blog posting and have some reaction to it or desire to comment on it, you could readily jot down a comment within the aggregator itself, that is, without having to leave your existing interface context?

In addition, I sure would like to be able to read the comments that have already been added to a post within the aggregator itself. I know of course that there are ways to make the feed a combined post/comments feed and that this is one way to achieve the goal. But it isn’t be as elegant or simplistic as what I would like to see.

  • http://www.twentysixcats.com <![CDATA[Ashley]]>

    I completely agree! Of course, when I read your posts through Google Reader, there is a link that says “add a comment” which took me directly to this box. Also, I’ve noticed that it updates when comments are added. But that’s only for specific blogs, and I’m not sure why some have it and others don’t.

  • http://www.familymanlibrarian.com/ <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    Hi Ashley,

    Thanks for commenting. I am not sure why there are differences either except that it is probably due to differences in platforms used for blogging, themes, or something like that.

    Steve

  • http://www.wissman.org <![CDATA[Matt]]>

    I agree too. The low number of comments I post I attribute to using Google Reader to read the posts. If it were much easier to post a comment, I would, otherwise I must really want to say something to make it worth going to the page to post. Sounds like a great Open Source initiative, an open commenting system (that also protects against spam).

  • http://www-dave.cs.uiuc.edu/wordpress/ <![CDATA[Dave]]>

    …and that’s where RSS becomes Web 2.0 UN-friendly. Even though it’s the groundwork for so much interaction and mashup, it’s still a presentation-only “push” system. It’s broadcast only. It also doesn’t handle that initially we were only posting web pages; now we’re interacting with them. Building more complicated tools on top is not the solution.

    There needs to be a standards based way to communicate that takes into account threaded conversations, what’s been seen already and what hasn’t (RSS doesn’t do this,) supports interaction in any flexible model (web page, aggregator, cell phone, etc.), supports offline reading (RSS doesn’t do this,) and is ubiquitously supported and already installed everywhere. Think I’m dreaming?

    This protocol already exists. It’s called the Network News Transfer Protocol, and has been around forever. But many people don’t marry the idea of reading webpages in “Usenet” In fact, most people will tell you Usenet is dead — and they’re probably right, if they’re talking about the Big8 shared news system of 20 years ago — but that doesn’t mean the vetted standards for how it worked wouldn’t apply to today’s new technology. (Dave goes into everything-old-is-new-again dogma here….)

    On my plate this summer, I want to use the WordPress APIs to build an NNTP interface to WordPress. (Well, since it’s probably the Blogger API, I guess it would work against almost any blog.) All the stuff is there — it’s just a matter of cross-walking components. Blogs become newsgroups. Posts become thread starters. Comments become followups. If you’re authorized, post a new blog entry by posting a new message to a newsgroup. Post a comment by posting a reply. It wouldn’t be that hard, but it would open up how we get data in/out of remote sites. News supports crossposting (so a single message would appear in multiple different views,) which could be leveraged for “dynamic groups” such as tags and categories. (So this would show up in the family-man-librarian and family-man-librarian.blogs newsgroup.)

    People probably don’t realize there’s a news reader component in Thunderbird and Outlook Express — they already have the means to read and support this standard. (In Thunderbird, it would even look almost the same as an RSS feed but have the missing functionality the reading-RSS-in-a-mail-reader lacked.)

    News isn’t dead, it just needs to meet Web 2.0. Think it’ll work?

  • http://www.familymanlibrarian.com/ <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    Sign me up, Dave! I wanna see how this can be done. I think this is a brilliant, simple idea.