There is an ongoing discussion within and around the blogosphere about whether blog comments are dying and or dead. I haven’t touched upon it much but those of you who hang out ’round these parts know I believe comments are a critical part of blogging.
Comments build community and help create blog fodder for future posts.
Dropped by Spin Sucks today during my normal rounds and learned about Livefyre Sidenotes and was intrigued so I figured it was time to share it with you.
Where Can I Find Sidenotes?
The plugin is still in the approval stage but is expected to be released any time. In the interim if you want to see it in action head over to Spin Sucks or click here.
Alternatively you can wait and see what it looks like when it is dropped in here.
I am very curious to see if being able to comment on parts of a post have a significant impact on conversations and comments. My guess is that it will.
What do you think?
wonderoftech Hi Carolyn, It adds something unique. I suppose we’ll have to wait to see what sort of impact it has and figure out if it is enough to truly revolutionize things.
Late_Bloomers Hi Barbara, I really liked the way it looked at Spin Sucks, very curious to see how it plays out.
Lori It definitely looks like it can give comments a bump.
JoeCardillo It might help fight the short attention spans some people have too.
Very cool. That would definitely make LiveFyre more attractive as a commenting system.
Thanks, Josh, for this informative post, I had a look at Spin Sucks and it looks promising.
Thanks for this Josh! It looks like it will add a whole new dimension to commenting! Can’t wait to start using it!
Lori
Joshua Wilner/A Writer Writes JoeCardillo Anything that pulls people away from rapid scrolling up and down is probably a good idea!
JoeCardillo The signal/noise challenge is a significant issue for most blogger who are trying to pull readers in and having to fight to be heard/seen and read. I was thinking about how much easier it used to be to get readers and generate conversation.
Anyhoo, I think the change has potential and that pulling people away from rapidly scrolling up and down might be quite interesting.
Definitely think it’s a step in the right direction….at heart it’s really a signal v. noise question and I can imagine that blogs with tons of comments are having problems surfacing the good stuff.
From a design perspective, what we’ll probably get to eventually is a virtual worlds model, and anything that takes us out of the standard vertical up and down scrolling pages model is probably a good thing.