Comments on: The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere

By: ventureblogalist

ventureblogalist — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:59:55 +0000

Brad, I have an interesting technology partnership to suggest for TrustPlus. Could you send me appropriate contact details or get in touch to vet my suggestion.

Thanks,
Rob

By: ventureblogalist

ventureblogalist — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:40:31 +0000

tracking comment streams is not as easy as subscribing to rss feeds and it should be even easier than that. Cocomment UI is not there yet.

Has anyone seen a poster indexer? For example, tell me the URLs of every commenter on techcrunch. This is a great source for finding new blogs but currently is too manual a process to research..I would guess 50% of commenters on techrunch link to their own blog in their comment.

By: meg

meg — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 04:21:20 +0000

I have to agree with Marc. Multiply has the best system for replies that I’ve seen yet in any blogging universe that I’ve visited or used. As a result, I find that conversations on Multiply tend to be far more substantive than anything I’ve seen on Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Blogger or Xanga.

In fact, I’ve noticed that when friends on Multiply turn off replies on their posts (essentially posting articles) I stop visiting. Posts are good, but a solid conversation following a post is even better.

By: Anne Helmond

Anne Helmond — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:38:07 +0000

I’ve been using coComments for a while now to keep track of my commenting distributed across the blogosphere.

Google pretty much introduced this separation by introducing the nofollow which pushed comments into the Dark Matter.

By: Marc

Marc — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:13:59 +0000

Hey Brad, excellent points! I’m one of the original employees of Multiply.com, which launched back in 2004 to specifically address some of the issues you raise. We wanted a better way to blog, share media and generally keep in touch with friends, family and associates.

We built the entire service around discussions that you can easily track on a central message board, which feeds you all the conversations involving the people in your life… even tracking new comments added to existing conversations. As far as identity, people who comment on your blog entries (and photo albums, video posts, etc.) are identified by name and by their relationship to you, so everyone knows who is whom, and why they should care about what they have to say.

Those relationships are what underlie the whole application — you know who’s commenting on your stuff and, because there’s a known, shared relationship between commenter and author, spam or flame comments are almost unheard of.

By: Shawn Broderick

Shawn Broderick — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:53:42 +0000

Dark Matter is going to become more and more important... http://broderick.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/wondrous-dark-matter/

By: Matt Colebourne

Matt Colebourne — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:58:53 +0000

Hi all,

Since several people kindly mentioned us I just thought that I’d point out that coComment is just about to releases Version 2.0 Beta to production.

However, in the interim, we do have a private beta test that we’re offering to key users whose feedback we’d appreciate.

If you’re interested in getting access then please drop us a line at beta@cocomment.com and we’ll send you the details.

Best,

Matt. (CEO, coComment)

By: Jed Christiansen

Jed Christiansen — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 09:53:28 +0000

I’ve always been impressed by the comments system on the Scoop (http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/) blogging platform. It’s meant to foster a community, and many left-leaning political sites use it for that exact purpose. DailyKos (http://www.dailykos.com) is the most prominent of these.

Scoop has threaded comments, users can rate each others comments, and you can easily search and see all of the comments any user has made, and trace back to the associated parent and child comments. It’s fantastic!

In my opinion, all WP/MT/Blogger blogs are wretched when you’re dealing with more than 20-30 comments or so. Scoop is the only thing that works for that, but unfortunately it’s not a particularly appropriate platform for non-community blogs.

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:43:06 +0000

@Jitendra – thanks for the heads up. I see it and will play around with it tomorrow.

By: Nari Kannan

Nari Kannan — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:05:43 +0000

A blog with no comments allowed is an “Article”. That’s what the press and columnists do. Blog is inherently an unstructured column that expresses a point of view. Replies to blogs add to the fun concersational nature of the medium.

At the same time digressions, rat holes and anonymous postings for mischief end up cheapening the whole medium.

Currently blog replies are ordered purely by time and in some cases in reverse order. The blog authors and other readers should have some control over brushing aside irrelevant asides and those that add something to the conversation. Some kind of blog author and reader actions while moderating indicating to the readers what they found interesting either as adding or counterpoints to the main topic or spawning off as a subtopic in its own right could be good.

Semantic properties of replies should be there that dynamically present reordering of the replies as more come in could be an interesting variation of current blog software!