Brand Strategy for a Networked World - Latest Comments in Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Tiffany Monhollon — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:41:13 -0000

Interesting that you bring up the idea of the value inherent to comments. This idea seems to have social capital written all over it. I think comments are inherently valuable both to those who blog - ndividuals, groups, businesses, etc. - but also to communities themselves. Comments appear to have some aspect of currency within social media as well. The more comments a post receives, the more people perceive it as valuable, the more comments it will generate. It's an interesting cycle, isn't it?

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Michael Leis — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:03:50 -0000

@paula: agreed. Another click away is a killer. I have been liking the sites that use the columnar right for recent comments across the board, in that it gives you a sense of what's being bandied around the different articles, and directs you to those posts.

Wow. Bandied. Who knew the king's english would have popped out?

@russ: Well, if we're facing things, we should also face that it may feel more comfortable because it fits with our own habitual sense of read first, react second. But my habits of interaction today are nowhere near the Super Smash Bros. Brawl sensibilities that make up the future of our jobs and the brands we help to anticipate those trends.

Bless you for saying my articles are short. +2

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Russ — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:46:42 -0000

Let's face it, comments are at the bottom for a couple of reasons:

From a page-view/adview perspective it's a +1

From an author perspective it's a "you've got to read my article to get to the discussion" +1

For the readers, it *might* make more sense to allow them to "tag" a point in the article that highlights a specific comment (kind of like a tool tip). It could almost be Plurk-like--but the articles might have to be more like Michael's (shorter) and less like mine (the Odyssey).

Just a thought. Good post.

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Rotkapchen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:34:55 -0000

For some of us it's always been about the conversation. I've always hated not only having the comments buried below the text but often another click away -- as opposed to columnar right.

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Michael Leis — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:10:28 -0000

Whitney - jackson, great comments.

All I can say to both of you is that if you look at the historical trends, there's usually some sort of corporate/technological force that accomplishes this. In the 50's it was Sarnoff creating NBC. In the Internet, we've already seen two waves of syndication of corporate buying/condensing.

Not sure what the future holds socially, but someone will undoubtedly come up with a solution. I think the first may be following Korea's "panelist" model in ecommerce. But who knows? All part of the fun.

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Jackson Fox — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:58:35 -0000

We've seen little bits of this floating around. Twitter has @replies and #hashtags for tracking distributed discussions, we've had rel-tags and Technorati for blogs, and of course there's Trackback (which seems to have fallen to the spammers).

The creator of ExtJS, Jack Slocum, had a comment system that would allow per-paragraph commenting, but I can't find a working example anymore.

The problem is largely two-fold: figuring out if someone is commenting on a post, and making sure that nth-generation comments can still be tracked back to the origin. Oh, and making sure said system doesn't become Yet Another Spam Vector.

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Whitney Hess — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:43:02 -0000

Michael, thank you for raising this issue. I've been thinking about it for quite a long time, frustrated that I can't seem to get my readers to "engage" with my posts. I'd love to design the whole page around the conversation, and I'm certain that more forward web technologies would be needed.

Still, the content of the conversations would reside on the blog itself, and I still think there's an issue there. Similar conversations are being had on thousands of blogs across the web. Wouldn't it be better if there was a way to have a larger conversation, get more minds around it? Maybe we need a way to syndicate blog comments to multiple blogs -- tag the comment with the blog where it originated, but create an aggregation across multiple locations on the web. Too hairy? Too impossible?

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Michael Leis — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:23:13 -0000

Ryan, thanks for the link! That is a really interesting site. Plurk is trying the same thing by organizing the comments into a visual, horizontal timeline.

I find both to be a bit unusable. We'll have a lot to talk about on Thursday!

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Ryan Chapman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:08:58 -0000

Michael,

I know the Institute for the Future of the Book has experimented with horizontal layouts for content and comments, as seen in their Gamer Theory site: http://www.futureofthebook.org/mckenziewark/

Works for an interactive author/reader experience here, as many of the comments were integrated into the finished published product. Wonder if it would work for other types of media?
-Ryan

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

Michael Leis — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:23:53 -0000

Thanks David. Agreed. it is a design challenge for sure, and it appears to be a temporary one as we find our way to the platforms we'll communicate through in the future.

Re: Are We Designing for Community Completely Wrong?

davidcushman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:18:16 -0000

A great thought Michael. It's why I add a widget to show latest comments at the top of my blog. Madness that I have to make an intervention to emphasise the conversation in a blog though, isn't it?

Same thinking could and should be applied to video and its emerging microblogging models (seesmic, qik et al).

One way for designers to approach it might be:
How do I illustrate putting the conversation at the heart of this?