A VC - Latest Comments in When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

joshviney — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:45:22 -0000

Maybe the best posts act as catalysts for great comments. It is true that most publishing platforms are poor at bubbling up the conversation. All blogging platforms are horrendous at providing user access to content that is not timely, so the good stuff ultimately gets lost. Some folks have tried to promote the conversation by allowing comments and suggestions to become full blown posts - see PublicSquarehq.com. Still it's just 1 publishing platform, and the conversation happens everywhere.

My idea I just made up:
Combine publishing platform API's with an application like Disqus, decentralized identity like OpenID and syndication. Link everything together no matter the source and publish into conversation-style timelines and let reputations of and relationships between real people filter the noise. Ha. Or just ask Disqus to add a button where readers can request the author or publisher to re-post the comment as a full post.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

isayusay — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:56:52 -0000

If they were hyperlinks, users will always see the latest.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Ken Kennedy — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:23:13 -0000

Agreed. It's still early days for cross-domain comment reputations (versus the mature ones like Slashdot's internal moderation and meta-moderation system). But the fact that Disqus / Intense Debate, etc. have the beginnings of a system is something. As of now, it appears that ratings (at least at Disqus) apply more to the user than the individual comment...which doesn't help as much for this particular issue (read: useful, but not sufficient). But I expect (hope?) that things will evolve.It should certainly be possible to push high-quality comments up towards higher visibility in such a way that they join the larger conversation. Whether that's attention by Techmeme and Digg, or something more interesting, remains to be seen.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

ericola — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:41:46 -0000

greetings from germany/saarbrücken
http://www.sportreporter24.de

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Alex Hammer — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:58:23 -0000

THE CONVERSATION WILL OVERRIDE THE CONVERSANT. In other works, the participating audience will rise in importance relative to the broadcast. This is the phenomenon of participation (e.g. participatory journalism), crowdsourcing, etc.

Wikipedia is an (already) classic example. The content is the aggregate (always changing) of the (participating) audience. Twitter and Friendfeed and Facebook and other services have elements of this as well.

Prediction models (including for investing) tapping into "the wisdom of crowds" will gain prominence. As another prominent example, the joint computering sharing worldwide looking for extraterrestrial life built a supercomputer in scale that dwarfed the two largest existing computers in existence in the world, one from the US and one from Japan.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

fredwilson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:10:06 -0000

Right

Reblogging comments is going to be important

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Jeff Jarvis — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:50:32 -0000

I think there's something bigger, architecturally, going on here that involves highlighting and alerting/updating. I've written about this in the context of corrections:

If (well, when) I write something wrong, I want to (a) correct it openly and visibly on the top layer of the blog -- not just in the comments when it is and important correction -- and (b) it would be wonderful if I could alert all those who linked to and even read my post to the fact that there has been a correction.

We could do the same thing with substantive responses to a post, especially by parties to it -- the Hornik example.

Some of this is necessarily qualitative; we don't want every comment brought to the front; we don't want a feed of every correction someone makes. So this needs to be a judgment probably by the post's original author who responsibly says, 'I need to update my linkers and readers to this.'

This isn't true just of blogs but also of news stories. And it becomes all the more important as news is viewed less as a product and more as a process.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

kidmercury — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:09:46 -0000

techmeme + a human editor is the future IMO, and will solve problems like what fred noted in his post.....sort of like the idea mahalo has in terms of starting where the search engines leave off, a human editor can start where techmeme left off

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

fredwilson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:58:05 -0000

I'll second that praise of david. He's one of the good guys in the VC business for sure.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Dan Weinreb — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:46:43 -0000

I did read David Hornik's reply, and I'm very glad I did, but I had to go through a lot of other (interesting, but long) stuff to reach it. So I think you're right; there needs to be a way to make this easier. It's interesting that Scoble's reply to Hornik was, essentially, "Isn't it great that with the web, it's possible for you to make this kind of rebuttal?", rather than actually making a counter-rebuttal (at least, that's the impression I got). It's true that it's great but, as you point out, it could be better.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

fredwilson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:30:08 -0000

Blogs aren't balanced and that's the way it should be

But aggregators like techmeme and hacker news should be

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

GabeRivera — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:24:19 -0000

Fred: that sounds great. I missed your point about Disqus because I read your post too fast.

Svetlana: I'll take a look. Even if less than 10% are good suggestions in my view, it will be worth the read!

Dave Winer: can I blurbify that excellent quote?

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

fredwilson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:18:56 -0000

i care what techmeme and hacker news think is important because tens of thousand, probably hundreds of thousands, of exactly the people I care about most consider them imporant sources for them

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

fredwilson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:15:41 -0000

i don't think techmeme should solve this problem. i think the comment systems should by allowing blog (and comment) authors to reblog the comments as full blown posts. then the best comments will be seen by techmeme as posts

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Svetlana Gladkova — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:04:32 -0000

I support your point here Gabe - I can not imagine how Techmeme could possibly handle all the comments - after all, the comments are relevant to the posts they are submitted to and and thus they should all appear in the Discussion section. I can imagine how cluttered it will become!

By the way, I have created a small poll at http://www.profy.com/2008/0... to see what our readers think about Techmeme sources as we have seen to many suggestions already. I believe you may be interested in the answers (though the poll has been live for a few moments only so you won't see anything interesting there as of yet).

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

dave — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:22:16 -0000

Fred TechMeme is the anti-blog, it takes what's good about blogging and sucks all the life out of it.

Once again something that's wonderfu because it's decentralized is pulled back from the brink greatness by centralization.

Stop caring what TM thinks is important. It's a piece of software. We're the sentient beings.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

vincentvw — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:20:35 -0000

What about comments that have been rated way up there, in a Disqus, Digg, or Slashdot kind of way? That shouldn't be that uncommon.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

GabeRivera — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:02:42 -0000

Yeah, it would be nice to have some comments, including David's, appear on Techmeme somehow. But given the limited expected payoff (examples like the one you describe are rare) and the difficulty involve (people link to comments much less than to posts), supporting that might not move high enough up my priority list to happen as soon as you'd like.

Apologies to David Hornik...

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

JoeDuck — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:30:20 -0000

Yes. TechMeme does a fine job of surfacing the buzziest content and adding comments from smaller blogs but is failing to present really good stuff ahead of OK stuff from the key blogs. I like your idea of creating a way for great comments to generate some form of "guest post" at popular blogs which would make for a better conversation and encourage more comments.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Randy — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:47:55 -0000

I know David Hornik, I worked closely with him, joined a startup because of him, sat through endless board meetings and boondoggles with him. I don't know Scoble (and am loathe to steal a great political line), but rest assured, I can't imagine he's any David Hornik. The man is truly a great sage, a great investor, a good friend, and one of the very few folks on Sand Hill worthy of undiluted or unqualified trust.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

David Zotter — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:31:16 -0000

..... some people don't want more noise. Techmeme is already becoming bloated, in my opinion. They can't reasonably cover every single angle on the entire web.

Start a blog a post your own opinion..... i think. Comments should not be weighted the same as blogs.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Jeremy Toeman — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:36:42 -0000

While I think everyone would agree the comments often exceed the posts in regards to the points being made, quality, etc. But how does this get tracked? Who judges a "good" comment"? I think this is certainly beyond the capabilities of TechMeme.

Perhaps the onus is on the blog poster themselves to call out good comments? Or maybe Disqus/Friendfeed will enable this. I don't think it belongs on Techmeme though, just as a great op-ed never makes the front page of a newspaper.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Mark — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:47:47 -0000

what about the great ideas/writing that comes from microblogs?!

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

bijan — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:04:11 -0000

well david's comment didn't make techmeme but it's the top of the list on hacker news.

here's a screen shot:

http://bit.ly/4gAd92

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

loupaglia — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:01:59 -0000

Fred: Great post, I think there are a number of methods of tracking like Techmeme and comment management like you mentioned, Disqus. But there is still nothing, even FriendFeed, that closes the loop because the systems are still silo'd and users are not on all systems as of yet. That has to change.

For me, nothing drives your point home more than this simple fact. I read Scoble's post and found it quite provocative (and was not at the event so at some degree you have to trust the writer). If it was not for your post today, I would not have seen David Hornik's response which was a valuable rebuttal.

I think this will solve itself eventually. In the meantime, it is incumbent on the reader to track down information to ensure they have all relevant information.