I just came across a post by Jack Slocum in which he describes how he built a whole new comments system using the Yahoo! UI.
It’s a pretty amazing achievement and to my mind represents a significant advance for the way that people interact within blogs.
Whereas on a regular blog post you have only a single comment in which to make what may be multiple points, on Jack’s blog you can post separate comments that are visually tied to specific parts of a post.
This allows for multiple conversations to carry on simultaneously about different aspects of a blog post.
I could see this being hugely useful for technical posts where different sections of code or concepts could be discussed individually, without the need to refer back to the point being discussed.
Nor would you need to skip over non-related comments to get to the next comment that is relevant to that particular discussion.
The only potential downside I see is whether higher-level discussions of the post as a whole will be abandoned in favor of many ‘micro-comments’ about individual parts of the post.
You can still view all the comments as a single thread, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this view doesn’t make a great deal of sense any more as commenters wouldn’t see a need to reference the part of the post on which they are commenting.
In any event, it’s a wonderful implementation of an exciting concept — here’s hoping someone will create plugins to do this with the main blogging systems at some point in the future.
Offhand, it reminds me of tabs in a school binder. Pretty neat and good to know it can be done with WordPress. Almost sort of like adding notes to Flickr to highlight a certain portion (context) of a work.
Neato. 🙂
Great find! Thank you for sharing!
My only negative feedback would be the choice of icon used to represent the comments – I would probably make it a comment icon as opposed to that yellowish arrow thing (like the icons he uses for comments at the bottom of the post), so that people have some visual indication of what the purpose of that icon is. Other than that, how cool!!!
Thanks again!
Great find!
Thanks!
*Jon* – good point. You’re right in that it’s not immediately obvious what the icons mean in the current format.
Overall though, this solution has a lot of potential. This is the biggest advance that I’ve seen in blogging in a while. I look forward to seeing how it is developed and applied elsewhere.
Christian,
Yeah, I agree with you! I thought about it after I left my comment and wondered if it came across as harsh… sorry! I think what he has done is awesome! Contextual commenting is very cool… wish I would have thought of it! 😉
BTW: commenting on your blog is long overdue! There have been several posts over the last couple of weeks since I’ve been reading that I wanted to comment on… especially the rounded corners roundup!!! Just fantastic!!
Thank you!
Jon
*Jon* – I’m glad that you’ve found my site useful. Thanks for joining in the discussion!