On Mar 10, 2009, at 6:20 PM, Randall Leeds wrote:
Leaving comments on the original feed is important and clean and we
should rethink this first idea as a "share on Melkjug with note"
function which has analogy in Google Reader. (Whether these could be
threaded is a fun, but tangential issue.) Seeing which other Melk-
people shared an article I'm reading and what they said would be fun
and could help people identify other users to follow. It should not
subsume the feed's native comment support.
Yeah I agree that would be a nice enhancement -- I think of delicious
here too. Presentation is the tricky part to me. I don't really want
something that would drag you away from the main view... It would be
kind of cool as a little expander that opens up in the regular view of
an article. UI folks?
Idea 2:
Scrape comments off the original post to display (read-only) on
Melkjug.
I suspect it'd be difficult to widely support commenting 'on a post'
from Melkjug and I think we should *not* do this. In the case of
Disqus people need to log into Disqus to post their comments. We
should not try to tackle this sort of integration. Instead, we can
just scrape out the comments to display them on Melkjug for popular
platforms and this would be sufficient for reading. Adding the 'New
Comments' filter Luke suggested would be sufficient for basic
conversation tracking.
Disqus users could continue to track through Disqus after having
opened the original post, logged into Disqus, and posted their
comment. 'Share with note on Melkjug' would be good for community
building and personal notetaking, but entirely separate from the
dialogue of comments on the post itself.
On the topic of Disqus:
A first look at Disqus makes me think that from Melkjug's point of
view this is just a different format of comment to pick up. In other
words, where we might normally see a wordpress blog and pick up its
comments, we'll see a Disqus-enabled blog and we'll need to pick up
the Disqus thread. If we did implement something like a 'New
Comments' filter, this would be an independent and primitive way for
Melkjug users to track a dialogue, irrespective of Disqus
integration on the feed in question.
I think disqus is pretty interesting. It doesn't look like they
presently support reading comments from other people's "forums"
through the API, but it looks like they're of two minds about which
way to go with that. Keep your eyes peeled for that...
For now I think they'd mainly be useful for offloading internal
comment functionality if we wanted a really rich discussion inside a
melkjug. Like phil says login stuff is mitigated by OpenID and to
make comments you don't actually need to log in there (you can claim
them later if you do have an account and don't log in) Their stuff is
pretty nice and the API for hooking into it looks pretty easy.
It's annoying that it's a centralized closed-source service although
they profess openness etc. etc. I guess talking through an API
somewhat alleviates that in the worst case, but there is still some
question as to who owns comments. It's also annoying requirement for
the product as a whole since you need to do an off-site setup per-
domain to make it work. I think it would have to be more of a plug-in
option like in wordpress. Could be a pretty fast short-term win though.
- Luke
