Comments: What If?

by Richard Reeve on January 22, 2009

in @CCSeed

Plato's The Republic, Latin edition cover, 1713
Image via Wikipedia

At WordCamp Las Vegas earlier in the month, both Chris Brogan and Liz Strauss spoke of the importance of comments in the blog-o-sphere. Liz has a neat strategy that she unleashes each Tuesday night which essentially uses the comment space like a conversation stream.  It’s what I would call a comment play, with a clear beginning and ending and a theme they may or may not be followed.  Her one rule, “Be nice.”

I’d like to share a story of something that unfolded across two blog posts and the dynamic interlaced comments that followed. Perhaps this can get us thinking of some new strategies to break the content out of the boxes we think we need to keep it in.  A few months back I introduced the idea of cloud publishing here and here.  This is one of the best examples of what I was then grasping for.  So, if you’ll indulge me, the following is the program to a multi-person dialogue (think Plato) we shall call:

What If? The Makings of a Republic

Act One:  On The Road To Nowhere by Jeb Dickerson with a chorus of comments.

Act Two: Getting to the Essentials By Richard Reeve with a chorus of comments.

What I’m interested in getting across is that too often comments are simply summations of what the post above has said.  Isn’t it possible to take a different strategy into our commenting activity.

What if…

  • we commented in a way that invited further dialogue?
  • we built new posts out of other stimulating posts and invited all the participants over to continue the discussion?
  • we became less interested in the real estate of traffic to our specific locale, and more interested in the commerce of ideas?
  • we encouraged others to take the ball and run with it?
  • you now add to this list of what if’s?
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  • It seems to me that commenting on blogs and on Twitter is, or should be the simple art of communication. As a society, have we lost the ability of conversing for the simple reason of learning more about someone and sharing a little of yourself? Has it become more common to always have an agenda than to simply share and learn?

    <abbr>Susan/Together We Flourish´s last blog post..CONTACT Beaver County offering “Skills for Better Listening”</abbr>
  • Hi Susan,
    The agenda angle is an important issue and I'm glad, even after all that been said, you raised it. I suppose on some level we all have goals and goals beget agendas...but to twist every communication into the service of that agenda can be counter productive. If someone adds value to the stream for the sake of adding value, I tend to consider them able to do the same where ever they apply themselves. But if someone is always forcing the agenda, then likewise, I'll tend to think they have no ability to see the bigger picture. It tends to reek of manipulation. Thank you for bringing that up!
  • Zoe
    Richard, PJ, and Luis,

    Thank you for expanding and clarifying your points. If, as PJ said, the goal is an 'open blog' that elicits genuine discussion, then I must say it is precisely what I've been striving for in my own blog. I'm not looking to be the last word on any topic, so many of my posts are my explorations on a topic... explorations that I truly hope my readers will expand further, challenge, or take along a new tangent.

    It's exhilarating to cut down barriers and crack the shells of limiting definitions... allowing "comments" to follow an organic path to something bigger -- that is completely attainable, and wonderful.

    <abbr>Zoe´s last blog post..Reclaim Your Dreams: An Uncommon Guide to Living on Your Own Terms</abbr>
  • Zoe,
    Thanks for the return comment...The light I hoped to shine on the practice of commenting seems to have happened for a little band of us at least. If we can treat all of our activity as valuable publishing opportunities, can embrace that practice knowing that in this media every pad, text holder, or field can be a creative opportunity, then I think our little band might just be able to expand upon something that's already pretty spectacular. Sometimes it takes awhile for practice to fulfill the potential in the media...
  • Richard, thanks for your kind words, I have an end game in mind, but I don't yet know the true path, but I will get there.

    Zoe, I agree with Richard's comments on blog vs. forum. What I am envisioning is converting commentary into content. There are lots of "great post", "thanks for the post", "keep up the good work", but that truly isn't engaging. What I hope to figure out how to do is create a blog environment that invites and engages people to create their own post on an "open" blog. Forums, as Richard mentioned, are more closed, not necessarily public. My vision would be to enable anyone that has something constructive to add to the conversation to be able to post on a blog - even if it is just that one time, or by becoming a regular contributor. I see this unfold by starting off with brief posts that finish with questions to hopefully elicit follow up posts from the interested parties at large. What I hope is that those follow up posts will also engage the audience and allow the content being published to grow organically. I'm still working on how to make this work from a technical aspect. I'm very much a novice with all this Web 2.0 stuff.

    <abbr>PJ Mullen´s last blog post..Wordless Wednesday #2: Guy Smiley</abbr>
  • PJ,
    I'll enjoy watching and hopefully participating. I tend to believe that we can throw our content all over the place, micro blogs, twitter, other blogs...everything gets captured through friendfeed where we and anyone else for that matter can evaluate the consistency of our words and the validity of our arguments. This is no vacuum, put a public marketplace...very much the agora that I was invoking with Plato and the dialogues.
  • While the forum format is a natural analogy, I do not think it exactly what I’m getting at. Blogs are the creative construct of the blogger.


    That's the point that I was trying to make, yes. Zoe's comparison was an expected observation. However, blogs are past the thematic centralization of forums, and, using your metaphor, ceding the keys to the "post" rather than to the perceived thematic tastes of the blogger. Of course, associations and affinities are unavoidable and will be created along the way. However, new traffic and interest is derived in great measure by serendipity.

    I do not think that the blog format will be undermined by increasing the vale of participation.


    Certainly not. Blog format, and their well groomed and selective third party opinion stream, are an evolutionary step.

    L

    <abbr>Luis Andrade´s last blog post..Parisology and Perissology pits</abbr>
  • Thank you for returning and clarifying that Luis.
    Posts and amplifications, here's to hoping we can break the format wide open...
  • Yes, it is really exciting, isn't it?! I'm so new to Twitter, Backtype, etc. Honestly I'm not a very "technical" person and I have an aversion to learning new interfaces which I think stems from my poor performance in technical "mathy" subjects as a child in school (no joke)... I learned to avoid ORGANIZED SYSTEMS because they were such a source of anxiety for me as a creative/intuitive child. I now realize that the problem was in the way the material was presented and that I do have a capacity for these types of things... so right now I'm making a conscious effort to delve into this stuff a bit more.. and I love how accessible it's becoming, because I suspect a lot of people are in the same boat as me.

    <abbr>laura jane´s last blog post..THE HIGH PRIESTESS</abbr>
  • Laura Jane,
    I can relate. It's been amazing for me to learn these tools over the last nine months and become comfortable with how they function. But they are just the tools, and as we tend to take the telephone for granted, as these options become more familiar it becomes possible to focus on what they are designed to do. There a huge data bloom coming over the next two decades, one which we are only at the leading edge of. As content producers, it's crucial to position ourselves in a way that we are comfortable swimming in the ocean.
  • We asked more questions in our comments. In that way we could provoke the thinking of the blogger to give us more of what they may have to offer on the subject. After all their thinking is what brings us to their blog in the first place.

    In the spirit of "asking more questions" here's one for you Richard...what are the ways a blogger can influence the commenting practices on their blog to stimulate the kind of engagement they wish to encourage?

    <abbr>Susan Mazza´s last blog post..“It’s Them” is the Costliest Conversation in Life and Business</abbr>
  • Hi Susan,
    Great question. I think it comes down to practice. Until the new year I flattered myself that I was getting comments, like catching a fish. It's a bit embarrassing but I didn't recognize the value of each and every commenter, nor the role my own comments could play throughout the blog-o-sphere.

    So, just as Socrates could generate amazing dialogues, at least in the imagination of Plato, my sense is that our intent backed up by the consistent practice of engagement does bring around the results. Well, the growth of it in this space since I opened my eyes might be proof enough for some. My "traffic" has grown at that slow steady pace it seems to be comfortable with, but the engagement level has soared...
  • But I wonder, to you and PJ, where the line between a forum and a blog resides. Do you seek to bypass the blogging format for a forum, in which all readers hold equal weight as writers? Or do you see value in maintaining the blog format to a certain degree? Where do we draw the line?


    IMO, Zoe makes a very good observation. Personally, I see blogs, and their inherent comment stream, as "post-fora." It can carry some of the forum format but blog posts, as far as the Net and its search engines is concerned, are a focused and decentralized stream of opinion, .

    Curiously, my Spanish language blog have a current example related to something I posted in 2005. Completely unintended, but, to this day and courtesy of Google, I still receive one or two comments a week.

    <abbr>Luis Andrade´s last blog post..Parisology and Perissology pits</abbr>
  • Hi Luis,
    While the forum format is a natural analogy, I do not think it exactly what I'm getting at. Blogs are the creative construct of the blogger. What if we turn the keys over? I agree with the centrality of the "post" and I think that is the strength of the media's structure. I love you example of a three year old post still having relevancy. You'll note that the link above to Liz's blog is a post that's a few years old as well. I do not think that the blog format will be undermined by increasing the vale of participation.
  • GREAT topic, timely and exciting! I couldn't agree more with what everyone is getting at here. I love what PJ Mullen said about turning comments into "full-fledged" contributions. Even the word "comment" seems to imply brevity or something that is an "aside." It makes me want to change the COMMENTS label on my blog to something more inviting/expansive. I think that if we got something like this rolling collectively it would generate a tremendous amount of momentum and probably would be really enriching for everyone involved. I suspect that the positive effects of such generous dialogue would "bleed out" into our offline lives, perhaps ultimately freeing up the channels of communication/information exchange on many levels.

    Awesome stuff, I'm going to post something pertaining to this sometime this weekend!
  • Laura Ane,
    I love it when people catch the "movement" bug. Movements do happen, and often in little far off corners. What excites me is that no inventions or more tools are needed to see this change spread. It's all attitudinal. It will spring from a desire not to post any more throw away comments combined with the fact that wherever we make our contributions, through the use of aggregaters like Backtype, they can be claimed into our own production stream.
  • Zoe
    A stimulating read, as always. I put great value in eliciting comments that are genuine discussion, not simply "Good advice!" or "Hm, interesting!" I love watching a post's implications spiral out into more than what I had intended. I really admire how you trigger that sort of effect on this blog.

    But I wonder, to you and PJ, where the line between a forum and a blog resides. Do you seek to bypass the blogging format for a forum, in which all readers hold equal weight as writers? Or do you see value in maintaining the blog format to a certain degree? Where do we draw the line?

    <abbr>Zoe´s last blog post..Reclaim Your Dreams: An Uncommon Guide to Living on Your Own Terms</abbr>
  • Insightful question Zoe,
    And I've been thinking along those lines as well. The forum has the membership distinction, always taking place behind the screen, where as the blog and many social media outposts have a public marketplace aspect. This distinction, that the content remains accessible through search to all is key in my mind. Second, the blog post is an anchor to the discussions that unfold. Lets use by analogy the difference between free association and amplification (a Fruedian vs. a Jungian manner of dealing with the contents of the unconscious). Free association tends to spiral into a life of it own, leading to a place very different than the starting place. Amplification on the other hand always ties the association back to the original contents. So free association goes from a to b to c...to z, where as amplification goes from a to b to a to c to a to d... Free association leads down a highway to somewhere else, amplification tends to illuminate a subject in a flowering of related content.
    Because of the care given by blogger to craft their posts, I find that the blogging format lends itself to a very different outcome then the forum. And what I'm advocating is that we kick it up a notch, embracing our roles as contributors in this world of user generated content. What do you think?
  • Very insightful Henie,
    The influence and reach, notice I'm not talking visits and traffic, grows organically, through real connections which take time to cultivate.
  • By addressing this, I am learning more and more about the "culture of blogging"...thank you!

    Thus far for me I summarize:

    "Persistence with manners = Results"
  • Richard, very interesting post. What if we were to take comments and turn them into content and commenters into contributors? Expand the ownership of a blog to an unlimited number of stakeholders. I'm still very new to all of this, but in writing my current blog I have become quite obsessed with the idea of an "open contributor" blog where anyone can post in response to some stimulus - being it a regular question posed to the audience at large or whatnot. I'm not entirely sure how the mechanics can be achieved, but the idea intrigues me. I'd love to know your thoughts. Thanks! @pjmullen

    <abbr>PJ Mullen´s last blog post..Wordless Wednesday #2: Guy Smiley</abbr>
  • Hey PJ,
    "...an unlimited number of stakeholders." You have nailed the vision. I think we need to recognize that we do not need anymore tools...only permissions.
    Your idea has opened something up for me. The idea that my Krater stream could be opened up to contributors who want to take the ball and run with it, who want to craft content in a way that extends the what might happen in the comment field. So thank for that!
  • what if it were easier to add a little something to someone's idea and then 'paint the picture' for them without so many words all the time~~~ what if something like this http://sketchup.google.com/product/gsu.html but better! was built into every "Leave Comment" section~~~ what if~~~ =)

    Thank you, Richard~Always a wonderful host!
  • Hey Laura,
    That would be neat if we could give the visitors more tools to do whatever...neat and visionary...
  • What if blogging became the finest form of collaborative story telling? What if a difference of opinion was merely viewed as a plot twist to be thankful for, and which made the story all the more interesting? What if blogging is the road that leads us to our collective story, a story that unites us like nothing has before?

    <abbr>Jeb Dickerson´s last blog post..My challenge.</abbr>
  • Ah Jeb...I'm so pleased you see your vision in what I'm advocating here. I hope you like the role you have in the above "What if"...
  • What if I totally agree totally with EKSwitaj's comment? The internet - blog commenting in particular - assumes an etiquette that sometimes isn't in existence - maybe it's sometimes a cultural thing. I've read comments on some blogs when I think "Wow, what a mean-spirited thing to say" but in that commenter's mind they're convinced they're just "being frank" or "expressing a valid opinion".
    What if people imagined their comment was part of an actual live conversation - without the insulating anonymity of the internet?
  • I love that what if Iris...an actual conversation. To often people treat it like the teachers comment field on a report card. Thumbs up, thumbs down (less often). Really, who cares. I want to know what you and Micheal and Pam and everybody else gathered here has to say. So back to the practice: taking a different stand in how we comment and how we treat the comments on our own blogs. Raise the level of dignity, see it as a form of publishing, capture the contents with a tool like backtype, and above all share from the depths of your being...
  • What if...more people got more engaged in dialogue, just to offer a few seconds worth of encouragement, or to actually discuss something in more than the superficial sense?
    It is getting so rare to see any comments, even on quite good blogs. Is the art of concentration and vigorous debate salvageable?
    Or are we following so many rss feeds that commenting is just not an option?
    What if we got a bit more focused...for long enough to leave a comment when the spirit moves us?
    So what if it's not the perfectly witty, ironic little jewel? Sooner or later, I think, it is a good idea to get out and circulate, throw caution out the window and just do it.
    In the end though, it's a good idea to ask a question, don't you think?

    <abbr>Michael Gaudet´s last blog post..History in the Making-Barack Obama is in!</abbr>
  • Micheal,
    well that's it...as Nike says...and the point is to turn the overall expectation, even if in a few corners of the blog-o-sphere at first, but to turn it so that it need not be the comment and run mind frame. So rarely does anyone really consider to do what Pam has done above, to cycle back and contribute further on the same post. Yet what I'm finding here is that by engaging the comments in this way, it is much more likely.
  • Richard, as an experiment this will be interesting, in the sense that I am going to have to give a lot more thought to my own feedback. I always reply to my commenters, but it's often something lame like "thanks for your comment". Now you have challenged me to become more thoughtful, raising the bar on my own skill as a writer.
    Jeez, what if I become a better writer? What if we all do?

    <abbr>Pam Robertson´s last blog post..Social Media two-oh-oh-nine</abbr>
  • Pam, Now wouldn't that be something. I'm all for practice, in the sense that whatever we do is our practice and that goes for commenting as well. Please let me know how your experiment goes...
  • What if...we could read and weigh in on each other's blogs and create meaningful conversation like this, and it led to reading, thinking and more conversation?
    That would be worth being a part of! I rarely look at comments at many blogs, because they are not really contributing anything to the post, but you certainly are talking about big change! Bring it on!

    <abbr>Pam Robertson´s last blog post..Social Media two-oh-oh-nine</abbr>
  • Pam,
    My own experience was similar to yours until I made the comments a priority, recognizing the potential of exchange that I was missing. It is clearly possible if we break out of the box our own attitudes, mine included, and raise the comment space to a new level of shared value...
  • Richard - IMHO, the only thing to change about commenting is that people need to do it more. You should never ever resist the urge to respond to a blog, because there's (so far) way too little actually reading and dialog going on. You and others like C. Brogan are always careful to ask questions, and that's certainly evocative. Mostly people lurk, it seems, which is fine; but we could use many more who are willing to weigh in.

    <abbr>Mary H Ruth´s last blog post..My blog has moved!</abbr>
  • Mary,
    I'm so glad you have weighed in. I'd like to see more as well, but to the end that it opens up opportunity for ideas to blossom instead of just racking up stats.
  • What if we remembered that on the receiving end of our comments is another real human being?

    What if we felt safe to throw questions out into the web without fear of facing snark for not having figured it out ourselves?

    What if we ended all our posts with prompts for others' thoughts?
  • Elizabeth,
    I really like that...it would take risk...but to reintroduce a true questioning posture would do us all so much good. Isn't it always posturing to act as if we know it all?
  • In some way the medium here is at least part of the message--we invite dialogue by not writing too much. For the most part we develop a blogosphere persona--no accident we pick an Avatar. You and I know each other personally and yet ccseed is not Rick Reeve in any phyical world sense.
    You cite Plato, but our virtual symposia are without wine or dancing girls. If we make mean comments are we only showing our disembodied shadow?
    Is a virtual republic what Plato wanted after all? This comment plays fast and loose with too many ideas. I'm not thinking all that clearly this evening, but I sense this is a larger topic that you imagine.

    <abbr>Sid Parham´s last blog post..Thank God in my Lifetime</abbr>
  • Hi Sid,
    Yes, I'm only scratching the surface and knew you would see the implications. Charles Olson had a line, "a nation out of nothing but poetry" which falls along these lines as well. Perhaps you will take this ball when you head is clearer and run...
  • JeanetteJoy
    What if...

    we shared without thinking about ourselves.

    <abbr>JeanetteJoy´s last blog post..jeanettejoy: @jantallent Can I RT your RT of a RT? That resume one is really good.</abbr>
  • JeanetteJoy,
    That is a big part of the impediment...you are so right. Great what if...
  • Totally true, why would someone leave a mean comment? IDEAS, I like that one too, nobody cares about ideas these days.
  • Hi Thomas,
    I think the mean commentators only define themselves and I find it easy to brush them aside like gnats. I guess the thing needed is to free up the idea of commenting solely to build traffic back at your own site. While this may be the effect, the goal should be to contribute and carry the content out further.
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