Thoughts on liberating comments
Most of the content I’m creating on the web each day is actually comments on other people’s content (or comments). Comments -though not always important- can sometimes have a life of their own and can actually formulate a persons viewpoint on a number of issues. Comments are easier to make than blog posts. They are faster and more intuitive to write. They don’t require you to put things in context or perspective. Someone else has already done that for you. All you have to do is tweak their perspective and provide your own point of view. So comments are important; at least to me.
Now there is this one thing I always wanted to do with my tumblelog. I wanted any comment I make somewhere on the web, to optionally appear in my tumblelog. Disqus has a feature for that, but sadly it doesn’t work. Don’t ask me why; it just doesn’t work. So I’m looking for ways to make this experiment happen.
What’s the experiment? Well basically comments are currently a “secondary” form of content in the sense that they are not necessarily independent of the original source (article or comment) that sparkled them. They typically need to follow their source of inspiration to be put into context. So you can say that somehow the original article needs to lead the reader to the comment. The experiment is to reverse the relationship and allow for the comment to lead to the article. Posting the comment on a blog as an actual entry point to a topic, with a reference back to the article or discussion that inspired the comment can be a quite interesting tweak to todays crowd-sourced web content. And I’d like to see that experiment happen.
Anyway. My point is that:
- comments are an important part of the content being created today on the web.
- A lot of important people have seen the value of comments and have invested heavily on them
- Promoting comments to standalone “top-level” content is an interesting tweak that provides more value to both the commenter and the writer of the original article.
- I would like to “liberate comments”and I’m looking for good ideas to do just that
