Encouraged Commentary: Bringing Natural Conversational Dynamics to Commenting
Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation. Why? It's not designed to facilitate conversations. That's why you see any number of people - Intense Debate and Disqus, most notably - working to provide technology that enhances the conversational dynamic. Now, a new open source project from Jim Jeffers promises to enhance commenting in a way that is both natural and conversational. Meet Encouraged Commentary.
The new commenting features - built using jQuery - take their inspiration from Ubiquity, allowing users to highlight the sections of text that prompted them to comment and immediately respond. Using that context, Encouraged Commentary begins to string conversations and content together.
Encouraged Commentary currently offers three compelling features:
First, highlighting any section of a post avails a "respond" button that allows users to immediately comment. Clicking respond grabs the highlighted text and adds it - in blockquote - to the content of the comment, simply and easily referencing the exact passage that the user is discussing.
Second, working with comments, themselves, offers additional functionality. Highlighting and clicking respond within a comment automatically establishes the familiar "@user" addressing to make the intended recipient aware of the conversation directed at him/her. The highlighted text, again, is brought into the comment for reference.
Third, the connections among comments are tracked. Mousing over any commenter's name reveals a list of his or her other comments in the thread. Clicking on list items allows users to "jump between related comments and responses quickly" - something that threaded conversations have been working to capture. Reply and Quote buttons allow the user to jump into the conversation without highlighting.
Granted, the young project is not without its rough spots. Users are reporting issues with IE (shocking, I realize). And some of the implementation of the concepts could use refinement. No doubt that will come as more people engage in the project.
But those issues are easily overlooked. Because what is most compelling about this approach is the natural conversational dynamic that Jeffers has captured. You do what seems natural: highlight and respond. And you do so with context. That dynamic provides both Encouraged Commentary with content and the "hooks" to track the history of the conversation without adversely impacting the user. What's more, it provides a series of reference points that encourages new users to enter the discussion - and to do so just as easily as the conversation began.
If we see widespread adoption of this sort of thinking, it's quite possible that we may see the conversation returning to comments.
To see Encouraged Commentary in action or to try it yourself, visit Don't Trust This Guy, Jeffers' blog. To download the source code, visit the Encouraged Commentary project on GitHub.
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This is awesome. The highlighted sections in a post would make me feel a little bit like I was being graded, but this is not necessarilly a bad thing.
Congrats to my buddy Jimmy for making it on RWW! :)
Jimmy's a smart cookie and the idea is great - glad to see him get some exposure for the concept.
that's strange
"primary premise is based off a design pattern that Aza Raskin demonstrated with Ubiquity"
but aza himself said, this is not his idea, but that he had changed the idea insofar that the button remains unobtrusive as long as no-one hovers the mouse over it. or am I mistaken?
Wow, this is great.
I love the idea of being able to comment on a specific selection of text, awesome!
I am gonna check it out, would love to have it on my personal blog.
Thanks for the article :)
Can't wait to see this as a Wordpress plugin.
Why do you say blogs aren't designed to make conversations easy?
I hope my comments can be of some help to you. Success in your career of teaching!
This technology will foster folks to comment. Amazing.
http://www.songdoibdcitytalk.com/blog/
I need the WordPress plugin, too.
This is a really interesting idea. Jim Jeffers is one of those guys that after wrapping up a conversation with, everything just makes sense. I have had the opportunity to work with Jim, he makes the entire team smarter.
I think it's an awesome idea, as long as it doesn't get too complicated in its format. Brevity is the key to good communication!
Yeah there are ups and downs to any approach. I'm experimenting with a few more ideas. Primarily adding threading (only 1 level something is marked as a response object or treated as normal) and sorting. Additionally, people are not happy that clicking responds takes them to the bottom of the article while reading the article. I may try a lightbox style solution to resolve this. All in all this just an experiment but I think it helps a lot even though it is not perfect.
@martin: You are probably right. But I give credit to the implementation that gave me the original idea. I first saw something similar to this on the New York Times website that allowed you to look up the definition of a highlighted word. They since removed the feature. I also implemented Aza's idea of making the button more transparent unless you moused over it.
Too many blogs, too many one-off comments, too many browser windows open, too many applications. Our minds juggle hundreds of communication bits and pieces at any given time. Keeping the connections between them meaningful consumes most (sometimes all) of our brain's processing power. Tools like Respond is a natural response (no pun intended) to ease the agony of communication overload. That's where the evolution is going.
Good catch and great review, Rick!
Kudos to Intense Debate, Disqus, and Respond. Your work is evolution in action.
try comment