In some ways I think this presents a good argument for content platforms
to use a separate service (or just a really good api) for comment
management. There are starting to be a number of services that are
specifically designed for comments (eg http://disqus.com/) and one of
the benefits is that they can bridge comments between disparate
syndication services.
Joshua Bronson wrote:
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Randall Leeds
<[email protected] <mailto:[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] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: Melkjug Feedback
To: Tim Coulter <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Cc: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>,
[email protected] <mailto:[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]
<mailto:[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.
