Louis Gray: Comments that Live Outside of the Blog, Good or Evil?
April 12, 2008 – 12:33 amLouis Gray has a great write-up on different A-list blogger’s takes on the thorny issue of comment systems that work in tandem with RSS feeds to allow commenting outside of the blogs the articles were originally written on.
One of the more frequently mentioned suggestions for avid Google Reader users is the addition of comments to the service, so RSS readers could respond to blog posts, either directly from the reader and back to the originating blog, or within the Google Reader community itself, in effect, becoming a social network. But while Google Reader has not yet enabled comments, other services are, and it seems the excitement of adding this capability is hardly universal - and its opponents have gone so far as to call it “outrageous” or “theft”.
- louisgray.com: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?: Silicon Valley Blog
Personally, I believe that a large part of what makes social media exciting is being able to contribute to the conversation. And increasingly as I develop this site, and interact with other bloggers and find new sites, it becomes more and more onerous for me to have to register myself with every new blog, leave my comment, and then wander off, perhaps never to return.
Sometimes I agree to have replies emailed to me, and then I can’t figure out how to turn them off again. Other times I read the other comments but I don’t know who anyone is, because often the comments are anonymous, or they only put in a first name and no URL
As a little background, I come from using LiveJournal for many years. I know, I know. Ugh, LJ. And you are right — It’s a closed system with a lot of fluff and drama. But what is really cool about it is that 95% of the comments you get on your entries are from other LJ bloggers. You can go visit their blogs. You can meet new people. In a way, they got the community thing right.. but then they walled it off, and now there are people who have a HUGE following in LiveJournal who can’t break out because their readership might not follow them.
When I recently discovered Disqus, I felt a breath of home, hokey as it may sound. Suddenly, here was a plug-in system that immediately gives me back that community. Better yet, I can bring my community in to the world of RSS using gReader or other tools! It’s like using StumbleUpon but somehow better because it has an API and works with WordPress and Tumblr and other services!
Anyway, go read the article linked up there. Get the rest of the story. I’m going to go check out Shyftr.
Update: Not in love with Shyftr. I’ll keep poking at it, but I can tell you one thing right now — no keyboard accelerators. For me, this is essential. Page Up/Page Down and mouse clicks don’t make for a great feed reading experience.
Tags: comment, Followup, google reader, rss, social mediaRelated posts
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