mtl3p

Does this exist?

(this entry makes more sense if you first read the entry below entitled “which makes me think of two things”)

———
A comment blog? Where someone manually, (automatically?) puts his/her comments from elsewhere and they form the entirety of the each of the posts? A blog comprised soley of one person’s comments on other people’s blogs?

Check out this guy’s delicious category of myComments. He’s been using delicious to keep track of his comments for 5-6 months now.

See how he uses the extended field to describe the gist of his comment? Now imagine that he use the entirety of his comment in the extended field? Instead of just the gist? That means (I think) that you could grab it via the delicious api, collect it into a database, and get it to show up as an entries of blogs. You could intersperse your regular blog entries chronologically with entries comprised of your comments on other people’s blogs.

UPDATE: I re-entered my delicious comment bookmarks to include the whole comment. The first thing I noticed is that there is only room for 250 (approx) characters in the extended field. So we can’t grab the whole comment if its long. The other thing is that as delicious is a system for categorizing urls, you can’t mark the same url twice with two different pieces of information in the extended fields. That means you’re out of luck if you comment in on the same blog entry twice.

Hmm.

On the other hand, it’s already happened that we’ve used this to increase the “long tail” of blog *and* more importantly - given people a reason to comment even after the conversation is a few days old (which is a big problem). Seb used my comment category on delicious to find a place where I commented, then he added his own comment and bookmarked it on delicious. I checked out his delicious comment category, and I returned there and asked him about it. It’s kind of neat how it re-centers the conversation and the audience around the person who comments.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 19th, 2004 at 2:53 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

12 Responses to “Does this exist?”

Mario tout de go... Says:
January 3rd, 2005 at 10:59 am
Utiliser “del.icio.us” pour garder la trace de ses propres commentaires

Dabord, j’ai lu ces trois billets : 1. “del.icio.us backlink feeds”, de SÈbastien Paquet; 2. “Which makes me think of two things”, de Sylvain Carle; 3. “Does this exist?”, de Sylvain Carle. Ensuite, je me suis dit que ce pouvait Ítre une bonne idÈe de …
hugh Says:
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:14 pm
mike, I think your rss feed of your del.icio.us/mycomments page can include your 250 characters of comments.

this means that you can print your comments in your sidebar, if you want, or make a full/side blog out of your comments, at least the first round of any blog comments.

see: http://www.sideblog.com/

I will check out this week.

cheers.
mtl3p Says:
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:42 pm
Hugh - great minds think alike ;)

leave your mouse pointer on one of my “mycomments” links on the top right. It shows some of the 250 characters that I have copied and pasted into the “extended” field of my delicious entry.
hugh Says:
January 3rd, 2005 at 4:17 pm
ok so i am unclear on what you are aiming at here. ONLY your comments elsewhere? in their entirety? … a separate side-blog would do the trick. but is that better than how you are set up now?

is the problem just that and rss del.ishing allows only 250 chars, so you won’t see the whole blog comment?
mtl3p Says:
January 3rd, 2005 at 7:45 pm
It’s not necessarily better than what I have. But I didn’t have the side bar when I was writing this entry.

But I think a blog that consisted _only_ of comments would be pretty damn cool. And in that case, delicious only taking 250 characters would be a problem if one wanted to automate it through delicious. However, if I were doing such a project, I probably wouldn’t mind cutting and pasting by hand.
fling93 Says:
January 4th, 2005 at 5:32 pm
Thanks for the link! I’m glad the practice is inspiring different approaches and uses. I don’t remember if I came up with it independently or saw it somewhere else. Either way, I doubt I was the first one to think of it.

I should mention that my rationale was to be able to track down material later for my own personal use, most likely if I was writing a blog post on a topic that I knew I’d already written about in a long comment somewhere. I also keep a text file with links to my comments, but this is only on one computer, so I use del.icio.us mostly for convenience. The public nature of del.icio.us is kind of a bonus, as I wouldn’t have marked the comment unless I was satisfied with what I’d said. :) But it wasn’t the main draw, which was why I didn’t even consider a side blog for it. If anybody actually follows my comments, it’s news to me.

I’m not sure del.icio.us is the ideal way to handle the issue. I’d personally like to see some sort of comment system standard or central database or whatnot which would allow users to see their entire comment history (of all blogs) in one place, check on any recent activity, and navigate threads (even if they were across various blog posts), plus the no-brainer user-authentication stuff, etc. All without the commenter doing any extra work beyond posting the comments on the blog. If made public, readers/subscribers should also be able to respond to any comments easily, which should be integrated into the discussion threads.

Dunno if this is feasible, or whether maybe del.icio.us or a side blog is actually the best way to do that with some tweaks. I don’t really delve into the innards of these things.
mtl3p Says:
January 4th, 2005 at 5:49 pm
Hey! Fling! Nice to have you visit.

Have you checked out http://del.icio.us/tag/mycomments ? You’re the grandpappy of the big trend ;-)
fling93 Says:
January 4th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
Well, I try to check my referrer logs from time to time, and you’ve already noticed that I love to write comments. :)

Whoa, that myComments list is a lot longer than when I last saw it a few weeks ago!

Naw, I still don’t think I really started it. Maybe I just merely happened to be the first one to use “myComments” as the tag (for the exact reasons you’ve already explained). But if I’m wrong, I suppose I wouldn’t mind having that on my headstone (or Wikipedia entry). :)

Not exactly what I had in mind for the extent of my contribution to humanity, but ya can’t be picky.
ZERO SECONDE - Carnet de note de Martin Lessard Says:
January 5th, 2005 at 11:56 pm
http://zeroseconde.blogspot.com/2005/01/perdre-ses

IngÈnieux dÈtournement de signets collectifs pour des intÈrÍts personnels (…)
ZERO SECONDE - Carnet de note de Martin Lessard Says:
January 6th, 2005 at 10:29 am
Perdre ses mots

you *can* mark the same url twice with this little trick (post in French)
martin lessard Says:
January 6th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
“you can’t mark the same url twice”

Not a problem anymore with this trick : Just append a fake #anchor to the url for the first comment and a different one for your second. Del.icio.us won’t file them as the same url and target blog won’t notice it

More on my (French) blog : http://zeroseconde.blogspot.com/2005/01/perdre-ses-mots.html
mtl3p Says:
January 6th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
Awesome. That’s a great idea. Never would have thought of it.

You’re post is great. I think it’s cool that you’re using mescommentaires. I’m going to make another entry today about your post and 1 or two others.

cheers

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Does this exist?

12 Responses to “Does this exist?”

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