Personal Comment Aggregation
I’m going to give this a try … using del.icio.us to leave myself a trail of breadcrumbs of the places I’ve left comments. Since no one has ever filled in the breach of how to follow up with comments you’ve left—and no, allowing me to “subscribe” to comments via email doesn’t work, because I don’t want a crapload of email, thanks—I’ll try to do it on my own.
Of course, this is still a very first-order, inelegant approach. No one really seems interested in providing parent-child relationships between comments—oh, wait, Dunstan Orchard was interested in it, but he’s quit Weblogging, and I can’t even give a proper deep link to his intercomment links, because his CMS is throwing up MySQL errors by the dozens :sigh:—or, at least they haven’t shown much interest.
Too bad, man: conversations have this way of going off-track, and while many Weblog comments are first-order—that is, relating back as reflections and reactions to the original work, which is what comments were originally intended to do, giving us Weblog writers the feedback we whore ourselves out for when we’re not looking for money from Google’s Ad$en$e—it’s clear that second-, third-, and higher-order comments can be just as interesting as the original entry when insightful people let their minds run free in a textarea.
Ay, me. If nothing else, aggregating the gfmorris comment breadcrumb trail would let you stalk me more efficiently.
excellent…i wondered when someone would try to do something like this.
November 8th, 2005 at 7:38 pmSo what features would your ideal system include? I mean, most blogging software out there today includes a seperate RSS feed for comments (WP includes a seperate one for each post’s comments, I’m not sure about others). I have a tag setup in FeedLounge that is simply “my comments”, where I subscribe to all the feeds for comments on posts I’ve commented on.
I’d be open to the possibility of starting a new project in the near future to satisfy this need, but I really don’t have a good grasp on what you’re looking for…
November 17th, 2005 at 12:48 pmI would be interested in this as well. It might be interesting to see where I’ve been and what I’ve said over the years. At least it would be interesting if I was consistent.
November 29th, 2005 at 12:05 pmA foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, David! Didn’t you read any Emerson on your way to a Ph.D.?
November 29th, 2005 at 12:07 pmI’m still working on an answer to Chris’s question, too.
Yeah, sure, that’s what they all say… In the end, they realize it’s easier just to tell me to scurry away……
November 29th, 2005 at 2:36 pmAkk! Evil PHP errors abound when commenting!
November 29th, 2005 at 2:37 pmSorry about any PHP errors flung.
And really … I have a to-do on this and everything. I’m trying to fully frame what I’m looking for here. What you use and what I use are both partial solutions; I’m looking for a full statement of the problem so that a solution [or solutions] may be formulated.
November 29th, 2005 at 2:50 pmWow, a to-do list… You’re already 1 up on everyone I work with.
December 1st, 2005 at 9:05 amPlease … I’m Alex King’s bitch! Of course I have a to-do list!
December 1st, 2005 at 1:27 pmHahaha. You just convinced me to buy Tasks. Maybe your sugar daddy will give you a referral kickback.
December 1st, 2005 at 10:19 pm:drums fingers together: Ehhhhhhhhxcellent.
[No kickback needed.]
December 1st, 2005 at 10:23 pmPersonal Comment Aggregation
I’ve talked about personal comment aggregation before, and I want to discuss what I see as the problem(s) to be solved and what solutions I see. Please feel free to criticize my idea—it’s still nascent in my head.
December 5th, 2005 at 9:54 pmHere are the prob…
Breadcrumb Success
In writing the previous entry, I remembered that Alex had corrected me in the comments over on his side of the conversation fence. Since I’d left myself a breadcrumb trail, I was able to find it pretty doggone quickly. Awesomeness.
December 20th, 2005 at 3:17 pmI do get u…
Geof (and everyone),
I would be very interested in following this it is definitely something that I also would like to see. I leave many a comment in places such as this - and don’t always (okay rarely) remember to monitor the conversation for follow-up comments. I try to leave a post on my own blog(s) linking back to the comment, but don’t always so that is at best an inelegent solution
Del.icio.us is a okay solution but also less than ideal. I want something that will proactively discover where I’ve left comments in the past and what’s more, besides my comments will allow me to follow other people’s comments (from individual friends to “a-listers” like whenever Robert Scoble leaves a comment somewhere etc.)
Shannon
December 20th, 2005 at 4:32 pmYeah, I keep thinking that a tool trumps a service on this matter, because centralization stinks and doesn’t scale easily.
December 20th, 2005 at 4:37 pmUnfortunately, you have problems on both sides of the fence. If you go tool-based, the chances of keeping track of other people and where they comment (such as Shannon’s example with Scoble) would be nearly impossible. We’d get back into things like Blogrolls, where you have to export and re-import those lists. I suppose that’s not all that problematic, since people are obviously doing it with their OPML files now, but I despise those extra steps (which is why my blogroll is constantly out of date), and would naturally shy away from such things.
On the other hand, if you went with a centralized service, you’d have your scalability concerns, as well as privacy, security, it goes on and on. Let’s face it, if this service caught on, people would want to use it everywhere: random blogs on the net, their own blogs, their company blogs. That’s the potential for a lot of information, some of which may be private.
If someone were to take up this project, I think they’d need to take (as my boss always says) one bite of the elephant at a time. Start with a very del.icio.us-ish service that simply lets you “clip” and tag places you’ve commented (url, date, time, possibly comment content). Once that’s in place, they could start building on those ideas (ok, now we’ll check and see if that comment page has an RSS feed for future comments, so we can check back in the future). One step (or one bite of the elephant) at a time.
Maybe if you guys have any specific ideas of exactly how you’d want such a service to act and behave, it’d be a good idea to write them up: what data you want captured every time you comment, what you want the display to look like, that kind of thing. That way, you lower the barrier for entry into this project a tad by getting the first step of the development process started before there’s even a developer to pick it up.
Blah, I sooo wish there were more hours in the day. There are so many great ideas floating around out there that I really think I could run with, but I just don’t have the time to dedicate to them!
December 20th, 2005 at 9:41 pmGetting as many people in on the discussion as possible would also help. That way you guys could toss ideas back and forth and help refine the plans for what you all really want out of a package (tool) or service, cutting down on the “oh, that just won’t work” phase of development when / if someone came along to do it.
Point well taken, Chris.
I wonder if this is a situation where distributing the load is the way to go. [I remember Scott Sanders bringing to me the idea of having FeedLounge client machines doing parsing and reporting the results to the centralized service. That's way cool and also impractical at this point.]
I fully admit that I’m thinking out loud here and am talking way out of my element. If you want to call me a space cadet at this point, I’m not going to argue; I did go to Space Camp twice, I live just down the road from it now, and I do work in manned spaceflight.
December 20th, 2005 at 9:49 pmHey, that’s what blogging’s for… I think the idea of distributed clients would kick major ass. Boy would that take some planning and coordination.
It’s like SETI@Home, only with feeds. And, you know, no green little aliens…
December 21st, 2005 at 1:16 pmJust thinking outloud here and I’m not sure this is the way to go… but what if there was a centralized service.
It started by doing some baseline collection of data (exactly the same way as a search engine but looking only for comments or other commentlike activity online - i.e. discussion forums perhaps). You might actually be able to reuse Alexa/Amazon’s index though I don’t know how well they capture comments.
THEN instead of (or at least partially instead of) continually polling for the data, what if there was a CLIENT based tool which UPLOADED to the central server pages with comments (with a probable restriction that it only does this for pages that are public).
The idea being to distribute and reuse the local cache of pages in place of the search engine like portion having to seperately poll sites for data.
There would likely still be some privacy concerns to watch out for (i.e. many sites might use a local cookie to display an indication of private messages or to reorder items by what you have/have not read etc) but that can probably be discarded by the index.
As well, it would probably be the case that certain frequently trafficed sites (Slashdot, Fark etc) would get submitted many times though each submission might contain some quantity of new elements but with many submissions would come the ability for the index to more readily discard what is personalized about a site vs. what is public and new content.
Just an idea - might also work for the feedlounge type application (if I understand feedlounge to be an rss reader) though since fewer people independantly request and cache RSS feeds seperately from their feedreader it might not be as useful).
Shannon
December 22nd, 2005 at 10:46 amI was thinking about this concept this morning, and thinking that the client-side aggregators that synchronize with a Web service [mainly the Newsgator family] are primed to do this: have your clients do the bulk of the parsing for you, and just be set up to receive and store results.
Using one centralized server seems like it’s still rife with issues; you’re probably better off with a decentralized network. Of course, this is all largely pie-in-the-sky stuff.
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:14 pmI have been thinking about this and more for the past several years. Last year I wrote a business plan focused on creating a system that does this and so much more, so if people here have programming skills lets talk about this seriously in prive’ a bit and see if we can get it built. My idea was simple enough - replace comments with Insytes.
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:25 amCoComment: Weblog Comment Tracking
Alex wrote me an email while I was off at hockey—yep, another defeat of those pesky Beavers; thanks for the four points, bitches!—to let me know about Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch entry on CoComment, which seeks to help uses with t…
February 4th, 2006 at 7:39 pm