DISQUS

Awwwwww. :-) Congrats to everyone!

Change is good! Glad to hear this is going so well for you.

O.k., let me see if this thing works :-)

I had the same problem with Movable Type. I even know someone who got a major chip on his shoulder about me not posting a comment... it's hard to explain how weak MT is in this area unless you're managing an MT blog. Which thankfully I am not. Plus MT was a huge resource hog. (Though anyone slinging censorship at you is just plain off-base and should accept what you say.)

I personally have removed homophobic comments directed at me from my blog. But I classify those as "evil."

WordPress has its own irritations, including some recent issues with the visual editor. But overall, I am sooooooo much happier.

Well, I would hardly call myself the final word on next-gen opacs, but thanks.

However, on recommendations, I strongly recommended that libraries fold in other review/rank/recommend services, such as Librarything for Libraries (or in one example, Amazon). Take advantage of existing social data and don't try to reinvent the wheel. Once you have that data, maybe you can turn on the ability to enhance it... or not.

Er, I'm on FaceBook and I can't read Jay's note. Sort of feels counter to the notion of his enterprise to put a lock on a gate inside a walled garden!

Dave Winer got angry? No, say it isn't so ;-)

Ryan's comment reminds me of my impression of YouTube's comments, which for any video with a real audience are largely pointless. The trolls have won out.

I created a comment policy early on (after an incident with a troll leaving homophobic comments). I'm not super-popular and am really not striving to get there, but having a policy in place answers any questions and makes it clear I am not making up policy on the spot (n.b.: O.k., when I created the policy, it was rather on-the-spot and I was called out on it, but blogging was still fairly new). Yes, I am making judgments, but honestly, after implementing the policy I've never had to use it, and I won't look quixotic if I do.

What Ryan and I have in common is intentionality. I remember reading a lot of woowoo stuff about "radical trust" a year or so back and (with my administrator's cap on, as well as experience with online communities going back to 1990) thinking, that will not scale. YouTube cannot possibly enforce a comment policy at this point without looking ham-fisted and sending its users to Google Video or wherever.

But you can go into blogging with the idea that down the road, not every comment earns its right to be posted, and that "lively commentary" does not include enabling sociopathic behavior (which is what most of that vitriol is). I think that makes a difference no matter how big you do (or do not...) become.

What all of you said. Limiting communication to the "blog to blog" model feels privileged in an old-fashioned manner, like the old I-write-a-book, you-write-a-book paradigm -- limiting the discussion to people who maintain blogs. And that would exclude many, many worthy voices.

I wasn't even aware people were saying "comments are dead." "Comments are a lot of work" may be more like it -- even with good spam software, that's still true -- but I can tell from my stats that the most commented posts are the most popular.

From Krasilovsky's post: "Ultimately, Backfence’s real legacy may be that it was a laboratory that helped pave the way for newspapers to seriously pursue hyper-local solutions that, notably, are not centered around local news (which it turns out, is not always very compelling)."

A bazillion years ago, while the Earth was still cooling, Steve Cisler made the observation that those of us touting community networks were ignoring actual user behavior. We thought providing community information would be key. Instead, users used the access provided by the CNs to hop onto the global 'net and find their affinity groups... which were unrelated to local issues.

Good for Backfence to try something new, anyway.

That's because when my piece got edited "data structure" changed to "data." It's a subtle but important distinction: our data is great. Our data structure sucks. I should point that out on my personal blog.

I have found as an instructor that if I want my students to use a particular tool I have to demonstrate it, make it available, show best uses, incorporate it into their workflow, and make use of it accountable. Trust me, if the wiki contributions were graded, you'd see content!

Hmmm, I think *I'll* blog this. :-) I agree with most of the comments above but have some observations.

Nicole, do you do these manually, or is there a widget/tool for posting updated del.icio.us bookmarks? I've started using del and really am finding it useful.