28 Mar 2004 | Scrivs said...

I have encountered the same issue on my site where I am finding that I am more of a facilitator of discussions than an actual educator. The value in my site has not become the entries that I write, but the community and its discussions of the topics that I bring up.

However, shifting away from the original entry kind of assumes that everyone who comes across that entry will catch the whole gist of it. Therefore, I don't think it would be too beneficial to post just a summary after some time.

This is not to say that the format itself should not change, but I see that as no easy task. And sometimes you have people who post comments right after reading the entry without reading any of the other comments.

A lot of issues to consider, but still an interesting topic to brainstorm.

28 Mar 2004 | dr.u said...

If you used a comment system like Dunstan at 1976designs.com does then you would have some context with which to pull this kind of information out automatically. If you were really gung ho I suppose you could do some text matching to see what it is that people are talking about and try to tie that in to the whole process also.

28 Mar 2004 | Scrivs said...

Well a good example of selecting comments occurs when Cederholm does his SimpleQuizzes and then post the recaps where he post the comments that were most useful.

28 Mar 2004 | Bob said...

Seems to me that if you want a conversation, install a forum - or at least style your site as one. All the postings are given the same importance, and you can usually link to an individual comment more easily.

But if you want to post your own content, then of course the posting itself should take prominence. It's your site, after all...

28 Mar 2004 | Tomas said...

One thing one can do to lift the significance of comments to the level of the original post, is to style them similarly as the original post, instead of putting them in a gray box with reduced font sizes. Although that won't completely level the comments with the original post, it does help..

28 Mar 2004 | Gordon said...

Not so sure it's so much about a conversation, or merely the creation of content as much as it is about the development of an idea, co-authoring content if you will...

The difference is that through your site you can 'brainstorm' over an unlimited period of time, with an unlimited number of 'co-authors'.

As the initial kick start for that collaborative content is it not done to us, the site owners, to capture that newly created content, edit it and present it as a 'final' piece? Is that the role we want to take on? Is that the role that we are (maybe) unwittingly creating?

28 Mar 2004 | Steven Garrity said...

I do think there is value to the prominence given to the original post over the comments/replies. I've always loved how weblog conversations were often about to have a better signal-to-noise ratio than traditional forums since all conversation must stem from a post first.

28 Mar 2004 | chase said...

The value of whether a blog owner publishes a summary at some desired time after the original post... seems to be connected to whether or not the blog owner is an active participant in the comment area. A summary seems to be adventageous for a new / first time visitor to a particular blog. Frequent return readers may appreciate the ongoing interaction from the author (at least I do) within the comments.

Can blog comment areas have the added feature of a change order button: desc or asc? If I am a return visitor of a blog entry, I'd rather be able to see the newest comments first.

28 Mar 2004 | mmm_soup said...

...oh, feck it. i can't be arsed.

29 Mar 2004 | Design Crux said...

Thermal mapping of weblogs would seem to shift focus to comments. What makes something "hot," like citations, comment number and length, and weightings of blog author comments would be an interesting experiment.

29 Mar 2004 | dr.u said...

So let us say that each user had to sign in "ugh" then we could at least see how many posts that user has posted. This would give you some idea of what value you want to place on that person, by ranking them internally or by having others rank the comments. (Probably too much work) Then if the Owner could throw some NetFlix type ratings on various comments and users the site could start to auto-generate it. Then you could throw in some automated text searches on only posts that had more than X comments to really attempt to find interlinkage. But then again I could just summerize it mysself and save a whole lot of time, mine and the servers.

29 Mar 2004 | Gordon said...

So where does Trackback feature in all this?

(And yes I ask partly because I thought I'd throw one at this post but ... eeep.. no trackback!)

29 Mar 2004 | Noah said...

Sounds like you want Slashcode... it's still working for Plastic.com just fine: just make sure to set your comment view to best comments sorted by votes first.

29 Mar 2004 | Tom said...

I think a site where the comments become more important than the post has become less of a blog and more of a general discussion site or forum.

Talking of forums are there any good ones visited by the type of people that visit this site?

29 Mar 2004 | Arne G said...

Blogs have two basic uses for me (maybe distinct from the uses intended by the Blogger):

1. Get directions to articles that I might be interested in (leveraging the efforts of the Blog author to find good things to read)
2. See what others have to say in response to a posted position on a topic of interest.

I dont mind that distinction, and dont really want the second use interfering with the first.

For me, View Comments (# of comments) is as much as I need at the top. If there are a lot of comments, Ill take a look to see what all the fuss is about. If its a topic Im interested in, Ill read the comments regardless of quantity.

Voting or automated bumping would end up with the comment authors working the system to elevate their voices (hijacking the digital ideosphere you host).

If I was to ask for anything as reader here, it would be to have a search control. Finding posts or comments by matching phrase or author could be handy.

29 Mar 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

The chief distinction between comment-enabled blogs and free-for-all discussion boards is that the blogs generally reflect the interests and opinions of a benign dictator (okay, not always benign) who decides the initial topics that are posted. Given that distinction, why not give blog owners an iTunes-like rating tool that lets them assign ratings to comments? If you're a visitor who trusts the blog owner's judgement, you can filter the comments to see only the ones that the blog owner deems worthwhile. If you'd rather decide for yourself, you simply leave the comments unfiltered and wade through them all.

Joel on Software's forum does something like this for topics, as does Edward Tufte's forum. But I don't know anyone who does it for comments. It does open up a big can of worms, though, because the owner will be bombarded with complaints from people whose comments only got one star when they thought they deserved four.

29 Mar 2004 | pb said...

What's odd is that nowadays everyone thinks reverse chronological is the best way to organize all content. The iPod sites are a good example. They are fine for keeping up with the latest developments but terrible at indicating the critical information and finding information.

29 Mar 2004 | pb said...

Maybe you should try a horizontal layout with one column for each blog entry plus comments.

30 Mar 2004 | mattymcg said...

She doesn't update often enough, and the blog entry is still on the front page, but I quite like brookelyn.org site where the comments are listed to the side of the post, not below.

It aint revolutionary and is still just "here is the post, here are the comments", but a nice touch that elevates the importance of the comments somewhat.

30 Mar 2004 | Martin said...

For me, blogs are about blogging, comments are secondary to the content.

In fact, I'm consindering introducing a system on my own blog not unlike Jason Kottke's, where I choose the entries that people get to comment on - and not leave it as a free for all.

Some people seem to think that because they have an opinion, I want to hear it.

Sometimes, I'm just not all that interested in hearing what other people have to say on a certain subject - that's why I write about it on my weblog.

If I wanted to read what other people have to say on their own weblogs, I'll search for the link/subject on Technorati.

Better still, how about a system from Technorati that automatically adds links of websites to your comments system that are linking to the same item as you?

Or is that just Google.....?

31 Mar 2004 | Allan W. said...

I thought Arne made some good points above. I think it might be useful to see what's "hot" on a site, but that can get manipulated. It is a useful indicator of how popular a topic is - at least if you can avoid comment spam...

As for powerful search features, I've enjoyed high-quality search features with pMachine that I use, and their new Expression Engine app now has a very powerful search module.

Using Javascript, it might be interesting to see sorting (i.e. asc||desc) of comments within the page without reloading.

I've found several times that the true content gems are located deep in the discussion, such as on ALA's articles. Hard to keep track of, though - I hate to bookmark them, there's too many.