John’s Jottings

If you write in a weblog I’ll bet you make comments on other weblogs and respond to those on yours. I’ll also bet you’ve done the same as I - half-way into a long comment you suddenly realize, “Damn, this would make a good article on my weblog!” You then exit the comment application and proceed to your new entry. This has happened to me both in making a comment on another site and in responding to a comment on my own.

Steve Mallett writes, in The death of the “Comments” section. R.I.P.:

What I’ve noticed is that people are choosing to have their conversations among themselves via weblog and have taken their conversation to a different level insuring their voice is heard. Among conversations between five to ten people each will make commentary from their own personal soapbox, their weblog instead of commenting in someone else’s space. They then link to the original source or topic of converstion instead. Normally people used to comment underneath a given piece in the originating website.

I think that’s one reason.

Another reason is that by posting to my own weblog I keep a history of what I have written so that if I need to refer back to it I know exactly where to go. If I write something on someone else’s weblog that I would like some day later to recall, I first have to remember exactly where I posted it, and then go through the attempt to find the post. By keeping my thoughts local, and linking to someone else’s article, I can do so in a manner that improves the experience for me.

Additionally, I might want to do this because of the “write once, link often” approach where I can take the time to write something up here and then reference the link when needed. This serves two purposes - to help drive traffic to the site and saves time. I can reference a post here very quickly in response to a question on a technical support forum, for example. In fact I see people doing that a lot. They see a problem someone is having, proceed to fix it, write it up in their weblog and post the link to the solution. This drives traffic to their site, allows that link to be used over and over, and keeps a local archive for the author.

Burningbird recently introduced a script meant to tackle part of this problem in making it easy for people to get a history of the comments they have made on her site. She writes in BY THEIR OWN WORDS SHALL THEY BE KNOWN:

Next to the weblog link in the new neighborhood page will be a second link opening a page listing the complete text of all the comments you’ve ever made, in descending order, to my posts. Above the comment is the author’s name, and a link to the original comment in the posting page.
We’ll be able to see, at a glance, everything you’ve ever said here at the Burningbird since the day I started using MT comments. I call it this new sticky strand, “Talkback”.
Now when people read my comments and ask themselves “Who is this guy?”, Talkback will tell them. By your own words shall you be known.

Now that approach is interesting, novel, and surprisingly unique, since we are just talking about a database here (hmm, what else is lurking in that database that could be surfaced creatively?), but will it make me more likely to leave a detailed comment there rather than here?

No, and the primary reason is that while the ability to see a history of my comments is useful, there is still no mechanism for letting me know when someone has responded to a comment that I have made. If the weblog in question is one you visit frequently, and especially if the weblog has enabled some sort of Recent Comments link, then perhaps you will be visually cued when a response has been made to your comment, but on a busy weblog that just isn’t going to happen.

In fact I just noticed that myself when I searched on my own URL in Shelley’s new script - I drilled into one of the comments I made which took me to the individual entry archive which showed me that Shelley had responded to my comment. In this case her comment needed no response, but if it had, I might never have noticed.

One solution would be a Trackback-like mechanism for an individual comment, allowing me to be notified when someone has responded to a comment I have made on another weblog. However that surfaces another problem with most commenting applications in weblogs in that they are serial and not hierarchical - you can reply to the article itself but not the comments. I’ve seen a few webloggers who have implemented a comment hierarchy system but not many. So this is really only useful if I know someone is replying specifically to my comment.

In order for this approach to be more fully developed we would need to implement a security model like PGP, which would allow me to “prove” who I am when posting a comment. While I applaud Shelley’s effort to expose a history of comments, it won’t take long before people start spoofing them. Which is a shame because I’m not sure that level of complex security model will be implemented for some time, and with a network of webloggers like Shelley providing scripts like this for their individual weblogs it wouldn’t take much to build a consolidating engine like Technorati to group them together and give me a global view of my comments across all participating blogs.

If people are uncomfortable about having their comments archived on Burningbird, how about for all sites, forever? Scary.

So whether for a desire to ensure your voice is heard, access to a local knowledge base, to streamline future entries on other sites, or simply to keep your comments from evil archiving scripts, the trend of posting locally and linking will continue to grow.

And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

[UPDATE] - No sooner do I write about the need for a hierarchical (threaded) comment system do I run across MTThreadedComments. [via Phil]

Looks like that other project for tonight will be need to be put on hold.