Musings & Meanderings

Like most readers subscribing to hundreds of feeds, I’ve wished for a better way to track and follow conversations, including comments (such as this conversation on comments). Is coComment it? Not yet, but it’s the first tool for this purpose that looks promising to me, and, as is always the case, success depends partly on widespread adoption and use, so please do join us.

When I read Robert Scoble’s post titled Calacanis Asks Deep Questions About Social Networks I was following a conversation. It may not have had the depth of the most memorable ones, but it was a conversation nonetheless, and the bonus to reading this piece of it was the link to coComment.

Last night I set up a coComments page with the username Vera. You can read my future comments, or see the conversations I follow there, and can also subscribe to them directly on coComments, on Technorati, or subscribe here: coComments related to Vera.

I won’t add every comment I make or follow to my coComments collection, only those which are part of an ongoing or potential conversation. The site says it is still in early beta, so I’m definitely hoping that it adds features I haven’t found yet, such as the ability to link or group related conversations within one’s own account. It would also be good to see some ideas for an additional linking process between these content pages on Technorati.

Won’t it be great if the connection of blogging conversations, including the comments on them, can be improved?

The recent conversation on comments grew last week, weighed in on (in the order I read them) by Joel Spolsky, Dave Winer, and Clay Shirky.

Next I came upon Brad Feld’s The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere. (It led me to Fred Wilson’s post, where all the friendly comments put a smile on my face.) Brad’s post also linked to various ongoing projects working to bring comments up into the light of day. I went from this, serendipitously, to Read/Write Web post, where SezWho, a feature for comment rating, reputation, and filtering, has just been installed.

Richard MacManus’s post, and the comments thereon, left me focused on the primary issue that remains foremost in my thinking on this in terms of my own online community experience and planning. Anonymity.

As long as people post comments anonymously, they will continue saying things that Joel described as “a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words” (bolding is mine). The assertion made by Clay that “the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale” is undoubtedly true, but I believe that it is also true that smaller traffic blogs published by anonymous writers suffer from the same problem. We just don’t view it as often, possibly because the smaller traffic individual has more time to immediately delete a smaller amount of rubbish.

SezWho, the new comment rating app on Read/Write Web, actually makes me even more reluctant to comment, since any reader can now ‘rate’ my comment. As it says on their FAQ page, a reader benefit is “Ability to influence content without directly creating it.” I’m not so sure this is a good thing.

The rating process itself might be a deterrent as well, since it is a simple Yes or No response the question, “Was this comment useful?”. Most blogs with great commentary will include the occasional simple statement of encouragement or support. I wouldn’t think that such statements would qualify as ‘useful’ to other readers. Further, a related musing, which can be interesting and spark more creative thought, wouldn’t always qualify as ‘useful’.

It also says that SezWho’s “scoring algorithm, …mimics the way reputations are transacted in the real world.” In the real world that I’ve been living in for a long time, reputation is not primarily made, or broken, by strangers, and especially not by anonymous ones. In fact, reputations are sometimes damaged, intentionally and maliciously in the real world by people when they believe that they can get away with it without consequences, but that is not the primary method of building or erosion of reputation.

Using a ’scoring process which mimics the real world’ is logical, but the core absence of responsibility and accountability matters. A lot.

It isn’t my primary intention to pick on SezWho here. I think that creating a way to make comments more relevant and findable is a very positive thing, and will be interested to see how well it works and evolves. I also applaud Read/Write Web for taking an initiative toward improving comment quality and integration.

Blog comments are a very different form of communication from blog posts themselves. The best seem to be engendered by both the type of content and the tone the authors set. Like forums and all other conversational formats, they can work well or poorly.

Many to Many is an example of a group weblog where the comments often add to the content. Many to Many occasionally has an academic bent, yet the content is very accessible as well as substantive. The percentage of anonymous posters is small. The posters read, and often respond directly to, the commentary. That is part of what makes a conversation and also raises the quality of comments in general.

My opinion is that indexing comments, tied to a user profile that can be coordinated across many platforms, is a great idea. Voting on and rating comments without context or accountability? Not so much.

What is Your opinion?

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added July 24th, 2007

In an excellent post today on Web 2.0.com (trackback below) which is titled “Socrates on books and blogs… and the way forward”, Nick Smith says,

“And what about comments? At the moment a comment is a cul-de-sac. There’s no way to get to know a commenter a little better, to see what other things they’ve commented on, or find interesting on other sites. It’s hard to extend the conversation.”

Some of that is being achieved by not allowing anonymous comments. Now I do understand that anonymity is important and even essential to a very few individuals who might otherwise risk their livlihood or even their life by speaking out. Even for most of those, however, requiring a verifiable link to their blog or website works.

Thinking out loud here. In the open space between aggregation and formal registration.

Is there already such a thing? Specifically for internet and web publishing, where formal copyright is not appropriate? If not, it can’t go on my future projects list (as that is already too long), but I’d add part time input and/or assistance to get one going.

What I am picturing is a sort of reverse RSS subscription to a public record, where the feed address is listed and the content cached. No anonymous subscriptions. Call it something like ‘For the Record’.

Attribution and copyright issues are important not only to traditional and professional publishers, but also to many freelance and aspiring writers and other content creators. Many a starving writer used to rely on the old standby process of sending his/her work to themselves via registered mail.

There are also internet and web publishers who aren’t professionals, but who still care about whether their words are misused or abused or quoted out of context.

Those who publish on the web for purely personal and social reasons aren’t the subscriber base, but many or most of them are also the readers.

Then there is linkage. I’ve occasionally found links to my own content that never did show up on Technorati, or on search engines. The unseen links area is not something that would be directly addressed by an attribution database, but would be much easier to address based on it.

Speaking of secondary applications, here’s the hidden ’social web’ nugget. The subscriber base would divide naturally into professional publishers, academia including scholars, institutions and students, freelance publishers, and amateur. A bit of further categorization could organize the data into forms that are relationally compilable, whether by topic, date, subscriber category, or whatever else you decided to build into an advanced search. Mind you a simple button widget for all current web posts and conversations on the same topic sounds awfully attractive by itself.

What do you think?

Would this be an ISOC, EFF, Creative Commons type project?

An opensource prototype by someone creative?

A traditional publishing industry initiative?

A combination private enterprise and non-profit paid subscription model? (say $10 per year for amateur publishers and a variety of schedules for businesses, groups, institutions, etc.)

Certainly the potential congruence (depending on how the db is set up) with relational search development is interesting, but the inherent conflict between private competition in search and the objective nature of the ‘record’ is problematic, unless a search developer was only one funder/founder of the primary information depository.

Quite a mix of public and private interests.

Comments? Ideas?

I’m not a techie …my experience is entrepreneurial and also in business strategy and problem solving. Discovering the internet, for both business and personal use (and despite the urging of my kids), didn’t happen for me until 2000. About a year ago, I began a search for a tech partner for a larger project. That search has been on hold since last fall while I deal with some major health issues, although I continue to refine the plans as the landscape here evolves. I’ve been waylaid by health problems before, but this is the first time that business of any sort has been interrupted by it. It’s why I always have to work with at least one partner.

So out I ventured last summer, and met David Crow.

David is a devilishly charming and downright irresistible force of nature in the Toronto tech scene. He’s been instrumental in bringing TorCamp (Barcamps and Democamps) here, involved in Mesh (which I was heartbroken to miss), together with many other active community members including everyone’s favorite lawyer Rob Hyndman, and much more.

His blog post yesterday is titled Army Tournament of Champions and it’s about a new contest for Canadian bloggers in four categories:

- Digital/tech/online
- Media/social media/PR
- Marketing/communications/design/research
- Quebec division

which has been conceived and set up by Sean Moffit at Buzz Canuck.

The contest looks very well conceived. As I read it, bloggers can submit either their own or others’ blogs for entry. The self-submission makes a lot of sense, since it calls for identifying one’s best posts. The qualification criteria are spelled out in the Buzz Canuck post linked to above.

The entries are to be judged formally, rather than via populist voting, another idea I applaud, although it doesn’t appear the judges have been named yet. The idea of going outside Canada sounds exactly right. It would seem that the ideal would be to have the top bloggers in the four categories form the panel, as in a jury of peers, although the quality and popularity aren’t always equal issue seems an important one here. They’ve asked for recommendations, and I’ve a couple of individuals in mind to email, and hope that you do also.

I’ve already discovered several great bloggers that I didn’t know about via David’s post. Thanks David.

Go Toronto.

*****

I’ve always loved my home town. Toronto is small enough to be human scaled, yet large enough to qualify as world-class. It’s immensely rich in culture and diversity for a North American city of its size. It was no surprise to discover that, in addition to everything else, we have a wonderful tech community as well.

Come visit us whenever you can, and hang out with our bloggers, too.

*****

Oh, and check out this Note on the Ancestral Toronto Home of Social Network Analysis by Linton Freeman and Barry Wellman.

In his post yesterday, titled Misdirected Facebook backlash, Seamus McCauley says,

“the Internet isn’t about the content, it’s about the conversation.”

and

“That (Facebook) taps a fraction of the potential value of the web: the fraction that is about the content.”

concluding that the goal is

“adding relevant commercial value to online conversations”

Accepting the unstated premise here (which I don’t), that the potential value of the web is only a commercial/dollar value, I recognize that, to the media, marketers, and ambitious entrepreneurs, it is the aggregation of online relationships that will further inform and direct their strategies.

It is a cynical viewpoint. Just as the tools of individual expression such as blogging, offered for ‘free’, represented an opportunity to amass a billion dollars worth of eyeballs, so do the developing tools of ‘personal networking’ represent an opportunity to identify and follow groups and trends. Leading ‘friend’ groups as hosts of marketing ‘viruses’, could command a multiple value in marketing terms that is much greater than the sum of their eyeballs. Part of that concept is already established via the measurement of advertising value based on a blog’s traffic, where bloggers are selling their reader’s eyeballs, although that is yet just simple arithmetic.

So from the marketer’s perspective, where all the traffic and activity of the billion people online is really nothing but raw data to be fed into their marketing analysis systems, the contribution of increasing numbers of users to both expand the depth and quality of demographic info they provide, and to group themselves into allegiances and groups that no consumer survey would ever be able to identify accurately, is just more ripe fruit begging to be picked.

Under this view, content plus conversation equals richer monetization opportunity. That opportunity belongs to whoever identifies and seizes it. Is the jury still out on whether the citizens themselves will always ‘eat cake’ and say thank you?

As always, though, my viewpoint is that personal and social benefit can (and should) be compatible with free enterprise. Steven always says that everything is political. Well, then, making a living is capitalism and giving it away for free is socialism. What is de-volving, however, is connection (and sometimes comprehension) of individuals to the economy that their presence and activity enables.

In a free society (North America particularly) blessed with a standard of living so high as to remove many of us from consuming attention to lower level needs, we should seek the opportunity to knowingly and consciously apportion our daily ration between the personal and the communal with a full appreciation of where and how commerce begins, ends, and actually operates.

If this were the case, then content plus conversation would be but one step on the path to all the destinations (or states) any of us might desire, including meaning. Data in itself has no meaning. Web marketers and entrepreneurs extract meaning based on it, and so do a few savvy individuals, for whom networking is a useful tool. Can we be satisfied on a personal level with a ‘world’ where the fruit of our activity is measured to such a great extent only in dollars?