Comments on: Do You Care Where Your Comments Are?

By: rp8

rp8 — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:24:14 +0000

There’re at least two ways to provide solution. One is some kind of comments collecting service, which tracks your comments everywhere and places under your name that is referenced by yout blog. The other one is to use a common commenting service that can aggregate your comments much easily.

We’re working the latter one. Both solutions have pros and cons.

Maybe the third solution is to ask each blog to publish comments RSS with some kind identifier so someone can aggregate all your comments as RSS feed.

By: Eric Rice

Eric Rice — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:50:15 +0000

I only care that comments on my postings are scattered to hell and back, ONLY because it’s harder for me to participate in the conversation. I’ll spend more time chasing around the conversation to be all Cluetrain-y, OR, I’ll just say, hey, the content lives here –X and if you aren’t commenting here, you are basically in the overflow room (or the kids’ table, whichever you prefer).

Born from DIY, I find that years of things I’ve believed in and supported are changing for me.

By: Michael C. Harris

Michael C. Harris — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:29:53 +0000

The answer lies somewhere between an architectural fix and giving up control. We’re in a period of flux at the moment, but commenting applications like Disqus, as well as infrastructure innovations, perhaps using things like AtomPub to manage distributed commenting, will see us regain control, albeit in different forms and places. It’s a gap, an opportunity, and people will innovate. I disagree with Matthew Hurst’s comment that the “somewhat amateur evolution process” is the trouble with the blogosphere. It’s a strength, and the blogosphere and the Web in general wouldn’t be what it is today without that.

By: Anne Helmond

Anne Helmond — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:05:27 +0000

@Ryan Imel: I absolutely agree with you that setting limitations is not the preferred situation. It will be interesting to see how the blogging platforms will deal with the current situation. The permalink changed the act of blogging by enabling a permanent reference link. However, the permalink might no longer be sufficient in the current era of distributed replies and content.

@Ryan Williams: I have a hard time chasing all the conversations, even though some aggregating systems try to help me deal with it. I do care, but sometimes it feels like chasing a shadow :)

By: Megan

Megan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:17:40 +0000

I don’t worry about where people talk about my posts, but personally, I leave short comments in the comments section of the other blog. If I want to comment at length, I do it on my own blog with a trackback.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:16:31 +0000

I want my blog posts discussed elsewhere and am happy when people do so, even if I’m not part of that conversation. The point is to get people talking, not to be getting more comments on my blog.

By: Ryan Williams

Ryan Williams — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:02:20 +0000

At the end of the day, bloggers are never going to succeed in ensuring their blog is the only place their work is discussed. Even if you manage to come up with some intricate way of interlinking all the comments on your post from various sources, all it takes is some guys to start discussing it in the real world (that is, completely detached from a computer and using real speech) to mess the whole system up.

Forums are probably one of the more prominent places this kind of thing happens. Often my posts will be linked to in some gaming forum, and that forum’s members will start discussing it. Sometimes it’s a dedicated threads, sometimes it’s just part of a thread.

Just let the conversation flow and chase it around if you’re interested enough IMO. :)

By: Ryan Imel

Ryan Imel — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:46:42 +0000

What we absolutely do not want to do is limit the ways in which people can engage with our content. That’s thinking about it the wrong way. We want to leave open as many avenues as are scalable for each of us, to allow for the least resistant barrier to entry for each visitor.

Now, what our response should be to this situation is to expand our current platforms to accept all of these different mediums. If someone comments on your post via a Twitter, how can that be roped into the conversation? What if someone drops a video on Youtube about it? How can that become integrated and a part of the experience for the rest of your community?

We’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg when it comes to truly communicating with these things called blogs.