Following the conversation
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the conversations going on all around the web and how siloed they currently are. Sure there are “universal” comment tools like MyBlogLog and Disqus, but most of these rely on the site using the system, creating several different “universal” conversations. There are also pingbacks, but they do not capture the essence of a conversation and can be manipulated by spam (even worse than traditional comments).
I’ve yet to come across a site that executed comments perfectly. Sure, some are moving in the right direction (examples below), but comments still come second to the content they are applied to. If your readers are taking the time to contribute something to your site shouldn’t you give them similar consideration that the print world gave “letters to the editor?”
ESPN.com is testing “real-time views of conversations,” displaying in one place every comment appearing on the site in real-time, and its definitely a step in the right direction. While they let you search by keyword and comment author, they oddly do not let you view by thread. Why not use this same application on the article itself, displaying new comments at the top automatically as they are entered?
Slashdot.org’s threaded comment system is tried and true with comment scores to help you filter out the noise. But these conversations get bloated easily considering the number of active users on the site and the conversation eventually gets lost.
BoingBoing.net recently announced they were reintroducing comments to their posts which actually disappointed me. I enjoyed BoingBoing’s highly selective comments, submitted by email and filtered by their editors. Only the best comments would make it through–the ones correcting a fact, updating a news story or generally contributing to the post–and would be added by the editorial team directly to the original post.
Most sites employee the “giant list of comments below the article” strategy which is near worthless. If individual sites can’t harness the power of comments how can anyone expect to extract those comments for the global web conversation?
So what’s the solution? Damn if I know. But think about this–sites like Slashdot and Digg attract millions of loyal users contributing, in some cases, hundreds of comments to individual posts/articles. These are often listed in chronological order below the piece of content in question and are generally “sound off” comments not engaged in a conversation at all. Imagine if there was a way to harness the “gems” in the conversation to highlight and re-purpose. Then take it one step further… imagine if you could harness these “gems” across the hundreds of sites all having a conversation around the same topic? Now that would be useful.
This is obviously top of mind for me right now, so I’ll keep you informed of what I come up with. If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in the sub par commenting system below.
