New Boots and Contracts

Happy Cog and Evolving Comments

It’ll be interesting to watch how Happy Cog’s new commenting approach works.

I’m unconvinced that a Tweet will provide enough context for people to have a conversation, plus if you, as a Cognition reader, get into a conversation with someone else in the comments, both of your Twitter streams will turn kind of weird. My guess is that most of the comments posted through Twitter will be high-fives and hand clapping.

I’m much more excited about the idea of giving people a place to post a URL to a blog post. I was always disappointed that the TrackBack specification kind of withered on the vine. I always thought it was a really good idea that was ahead of its time. When it came out, blogging was still in its infancy. But now everyone and their mother has a place to post a comment under their own account, even if it’s a Facebook wall post. Of course, blog-to-blog posting is not necessarily the smoothest way to conduct a conversation either.

Honestly, I’m don’t think comments are that useful in general, but we’ve had a few popular posts over on the Mule weblog where the comments have been helpful and actually added value to the post itself.

However, the biggest problem with comments on the web is sifting through the one-line huzzahs to get to the thoughtful stuff, and I don’t think a Twitter stream of comments is going to help that.

Update: Apparently blog-posts-as-comments have to be manually approved before they show up. I understand the reason, but I hope they’re able to make those approvals reasonably quickly.