On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Randall Leeds <[email protected]>wrote:
> I have two thoughts on comments. > > One: > For some well known blogging platforms, could we autodiscover the comments > feed and do something smart with it? > we could and we should! > > Two: > It strikes me that Melkjug benefits from having a strong community. We > implicitly push the idea of a Melkjug community by having following, starred > by filters, etc. What about adding our own comments system? Model support > for this would be trivial: store comments as attachments on the article item > in the silo. Timestamp when people click Hide on an article and compare it > to the most recent comment time stamp lets us add a Show hidden articles > with new comments option. brilliant! while we're at it we should also timestamp starring, sharing, and any other actions users can take on articles -- this both defines an ordering on the ratings and probably buys us other nice properties as the system evolves. > I think the most difficult issues around this are becomming UI related: the > question of what articles to show starts to look more like a logical > conjunction than a dropdown menu, for instance. > hm, we already have a way of defining filters as arbitrary functions of other filters... the dropdown deciding what articles to show is really just a filter which is a function of some binary filters (starred, hidden, not). maybe the UI could at some point just expose filter composition. if done wrong the UI could get hairy, but if we got it right it could expose a lot of power while unifying things quite nicely. > -Randall > ---------- Original thread ---------- From: Joshua Bronson <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:03 PM Subject: Re: Melkjug Feedback To: Tim Coulter <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], [email protected] Hey Tim, Hm, yeah it sounds like he's misunderstanding the purpose here -- we're not building a system specifically to facilitate discussion on blogs via comments -- though he might know we have definitely played with and have by no means abandoned the idea of a filter that promotes articles based on how many comments they have (the tricky thing being normalizing based on average traffic for the particular blog). In the meantime, it sounds like he may not realize that most blogging software provides a separate feed for comments vs blogposts? See for instance http://importantshock.wordpress.com/feed/ vs http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/jquery-is-a-monad/feed/. Anyway, thanks for the shout out to Melkjug and thanks for passing along the feedback. Josh On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Tim Coulter <[email protected]> wrote: > Josh, > > One of the commenters on that blog I told you about responded to my post > about Melkjug. His tone is a little harsh, but may be good feedback. > > And in due fairness I presented Melkjug as the wrong product. > > In any case, here's the feedback, and a link to the thread (scroll down, > or find "David Says"): > > http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/224 > -------------------------------------------------------- > > @Tim Coulter: Oy, what a name! “Melkjug”? > > I score Melkjug as a clean miss. It’s still going with the blog-and-feed > system, which disregards comment as unimportant. That being so, Melkjug > fails at the most important part of this problem, which is to bubble up > a blog topic solely because there are new comments to it. > > Melkjug (I did try it) doesn’t even show me the comments, and RSS > doesn’t flag new comments, even optionally, much less keep track of > which ones I’ve already read. Melkjug’s tuners do not offer the option, > “new comments” or “comment by a particular person”. “Starred by”, yes, > “Dugg by”, yes, but not “commented by”. > > Y’all couldn’t add that if you wanted to because RSS (I include Atom > here) doesn’t present any information about the contents of comments at > all. > > I have to remember to manually dial up this topic, because my reader > doesn’t pop up anything new until James writes another post. Then I have > to bring up the particular post in a view that includes comments (which > my reader’s view does not), and then scroll down the comments while > trying to recollect where I left off so I can see which, if any, are new > since my last visit. > > I am going through that process this for this blog and this particular > subject, but I will not do it as a matter of course or for most blogs or > subjects. Neither will most people, and so the discussion dies, not from > lack of interest, but because the mechanics of keeping up with it are > just too cumbersome. >
