In yesterday’s post I
mentioned The 3 C’s: Create, Communicate and Collaborate. The 2nd one could just
as easily be ‘Converse’, as in conversations. All of these C’s are things I strive to
achieve in my weblog. In an effort to strengthen the ‘Communicate/Converse’ prong, I’ve
finally gotten around to converting my Comments system (hey, another C!) to
Inline. That is, comments are now on the same page as my individual entries.
One of the things I admire about the web designer community is the way they all
comment on each others blogs and have these wonderful back-and-forth conversations. Often
you’ll find 30 or more comments appended to an entry on a web designer’s blog. And one of
the main reasons for this is that nearly all of them have inline comments systems (and
beautifully styled ones, I might add). Inline comments do promote conversations,
because when folks click through to your weblog from their RSS Aggregator they’ll most
probably scroll down to the comments at the end of the page, which prompts them to leave
a comment too, which then causes the others to respond, etc. Whereas if you have pop-up
comments, you need to click on the link at the end of the page to see who’s commented and
what they said.
And as I wrote a couple
of months ago when I first raised the topic of inline comments, it’s in line with the
two-way web philosophy I promote. Why not mix my content with my readers on the same
page? It should also foster some sense of community – we’re all mingling together,
reading and writing on the one page. I almost feel like breaking into a U2 song: One page, but we’re not the
same, we get to carry each other, carrrry each other, One… Er, <cough>!
There’s already a good conversation started up in my post from yesterday: Analysing Bloglines
Subscriber Stats. Want to join in?
