Climb to the Stars - Latest Comments in Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

Re: Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

Nicolas Krebs — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:16:05 -0000

If you don't want many comments (and therefore ban threaded discussions), there is a more powerfull way: ban discussions and close comments (such in this http://www.glazman.org/webl... ).

(of course your others arguments are laughtables)

Re: Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

blacky — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:58:08 -0000

Steph: I'm not sure that's always the case. Or rather: I doubt it makes a large difference. Some topics obviously are more prone to discussion fragmentation. Making clear (in the blog post) what the point is helps much more. As for broad topics, I tend to make them seperate postings in a series, possibly with a conclusive/wrap-up/minutes type of post at the end. Sure, this pre-fragments the discussion, but sometimes making points individually is better than having them all in one discussion and going nowhere with it. A panel discussion is probably very similar in this regard, but it's a bit harder to moderate since everything is realtime.

Bottom line: I think the positive aspects of threaded discussions outweigh the negative sides. But that naturally is something blog owners should decided for themselves.

Re: Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

Stephanie — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:54:27 -0000

blacky: one of my points here is that if you provide threaded comments, you encourage conversations to go off on tangents.

Re: Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

Stephanie — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:52:38 -0000

HI Christophe, when I say export my data, I mean export the comments that I wrote -- strictly speaking, the content that I added to the system. Just like del.icio.us allows you to export all your saved links (and comments/tags on them) into a big HTML/XML file. This does not include the tracking data or content created by other people.

Re: Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

Christophe — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 04:52:06 -0000

Hi Steph,

When you mention exporting your data from coComment, which data do you actually think about ?
Your own comments ?
The conversations you track, including all comments from those ?

We offer the export of conversation for conversation we managed (so called outsourced conversation), but for individual users, this is a little more tricky to understand what would actually make sense.

Re threaded conversation, yes, a long debate, with many pros and cons...... But I guess that it actually depend on the type of conversation you get on your blog. I think there is an intermediate solution between the two conversation modes: being able to reply (refer) to a specific comment in a way that it is visible when reading the comments: the way we do it on non threaded conversations (using the @), become really confusing when there are many comments.

For outsourced conversations, we have implemented a "quote" feature, so you can quote a comment (or part of it): you can see it in action on voxday blog. I see this as a first step, but I'm sure there is more to do ;-)

Re: Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

blacky — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 05:19:10 -0000

I think there is another aspect to the comparison of pub conversations (and to an extent, IRC and IM) and blog comments. First of all, the former are usually realtime, i.e. it's a true dialog (multilog?) of people and whoever reads it can read it as it comes. This usually means that you have enough time to digest what you read since the other party/ies are thinking about (and typing) their ideas. There is a threshold of people (and topic complexity) where this starts to break down and it becomes increasingly difficult to follow the conversation, especially if it's a bit out of your league.

Regarding blog comments, this has two effects. One is that some blogs tend to turn into chat rooms if they're not moderated. This has as least as much to do with the commenters/audience of the blog as with the topics it covers. Some blog owners resort to moderating or aggressive deletion of "chat comments". The second effect is that sometimes, people think very hard and long before they post a three-sentence comment. If I read comments "after the fact", for example a conversation that is a week old, it can be hard to follow. I'd have to pace myself when reading, which is a hard thing to do, especially if I am very interested in the topic. Mind you, this is not to say that people need to lower the quality of their comments! Still, with threaded comments, I can see if the discussion goes off on a tangent I'm not interested in and thus I can save the effort.

You quite correctly assume that most of this holds true for technical discussions. But I think it holds true for any discussion that is complicated enough or maybe abstract enough.

So on the whole, I prefer threaded comments, which is quite probably also due to my rather technical background. Having done quite a lot of discussion on Usenet and by Mail probably has a lot to do with it, too.

Re: Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

Stephanie — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:25:57 -0000

Joaquin: thanks for dropping in. From a purely practical point of view, the main thing besides the ads that is keeping me "cold" for coComment is that there does not seem to be a way for me to export my data, should I decide to stop using the service. This might seem paradoxical, but I'm very hesitant to keep on using a service (with which there are issues) if I know that each time I place data in it it's going to be locked in. So that would be one reasonably small concrete step coComment could take in the direction of its users -- and easy to measure, too.

Some of the other issues are way more complex, like communication and brand image (I don't recognize myself in there anymore), but let's leave that aside for the moment.

Re: Against Threaded Conversations on Blogs

joaquin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:46:05 -0000

Hi Stephanie,
I like your reasoning regarding non threaded conversations for blogs, as long as they stay focused, which is not always easy.
Also read your issues with cocomment, I hope there is something we can still do for you. As a start I want you to know that we are reading and responding to your comments.
If you let us know aside from removing ads how to help you we will be happy to do so.

Thanks