Predicting The Future (continued)

Steve Rubel's first prediction in a multi-post series is a good one:

Blog comments have perhaps more collective wisdom inside them than any other form of consumer generated content. However, as of today, there's essentially no way to mine them. Who's going to help us here? Will it be Google, Yahoo, Technorati or Ice Rocket? Or will some great new search engine come along and change the game. Tune in this time next year.

Steve is right, of course, but there is so much more to be done with comments than simply being able to search them.

We need a solution to comment spam, maybe captchas are it, but TypePad doesn't support them yet. Most of the other blogging platforms seem to offer them by now.

We also need a way to "subscribe" to a comment thread.  I post comments a lot on blogs.  I rarely go back to see what reaction they generate.  If, when I post a comment, I get the option to subscribe to the comment thread, via email or RSS, that would be great.

And as I have said before, we need a way to elevate the best comments right up onto the front page.  I realize that most of my posts generate comments that are way better than my posts.  I want a simple one click button that posts the comment right onto the bottom of the post.

Bottom line - blogs are conversations.  We need to start treating the comments like the important content that they are instead of an afterthought.

Comments

[Andrew]

'We also need a way to "subscribe" to a comment thread.' We have one. It's called WordPress. (I admit that this would be a better comment had I got round to adding this feature to my own blog. It's not difficult.)

[eric goldstein]

I totally agree with your comments about comments. This is by no means the answer, but one new way i have been using Clipmarks is to tag specific comments that i read and/or post on blogs. It's the only way that i know of to easily organize comments i find in the blogosphere. Typically, i go through my clipped comments once per day and click the source link to see if any new comments have been posted.

[charlie crystle]

ratings would be good. for blogs, posts, comments, and commenters.

[Chuck]

Fred,

Capchas do not work. Even if you shut comments off they spam still publishes. BTW, have you seen your comment section? Take a look at your old post. You are getting hammered with hundreds.

[David G]

The problem with comments is that when they are mined, we will still collect the opinions of a statistically irrelevant subset of blog readers, just like outbound links, but at least it's an improvement. Bottom line, other than reduced latency, this will offer a small improvement over counting outbound links.

Charlie --> give me another month or so and you'll have your wish :-) [email me for a preview]

d

[Gavin]

Gotta disagree here. I think the signal noise ratio in comments is horrible, and the more popular a post is, the worse it is.

I look at Slashdot as a great example of the uselessness of 'comments'. Yes, there are differences, but I think there are enough similarities to predict the junk level going up once they become valued...

I, in general, don't read comments (making posting this a rather strange thing to do...)

[Bosko Milekic]

I blogged about this some time ago and talked about a potential solution or two:
http://megaphone.unixdaemons.com/?p=33

As I've mentionned before here and elsewhere, I think this is one of the problems that just must be solved by the end of 2007. It's ridiculous that I can't follow conversations I participate in throughout the blogosphere.

Not sure what the best way to solve is yet. I've noticed one technique that uses del.icio.us, but is far from perfect. Some people who comment immediately post the blog entry post to their del.icio.us account with a tag like @commented, or similar. They then have to periodically ping the sites to figure out what's going on, but it's better than nothing, I guess.

[archie]

Gotta agree with David G. Too much noise in slashdot comments that is not relevant to the topic.

At the same time, there is some many new things that I have learnt from this ambling away from the topic, regardless.

So, tag based searches of posts & comments/only posts/only comments might be a great help

[scott partee]

IMO it would be trivial for someone to hack up a web service that offers a plugin to every popular blog platrorm and maybe even integrates them with something like Typekey and then allows one to install a script that acts just like the Flickr "Things I've Commented On" page. One just goes to the script and sees all the comments made on all the blog entries one has commented on (if one so chooses). Really, I could almost do it, and my programming is minimal at best. THe problem comes with getting support out of the blog software makers. However, an open standard XML format for data interchange shoulc make them all want to play nice together...