PUBLIC MARKS from Spone with tag comments

Forums and commenting re-imagined Embeddable · Styleable · Realtime · Free Add conversations to any site with a few lines of HTML. Gorgeous discussions, yours for free.

The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes. So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)

As updates and content flow in real time around the Web, conversations around the content are becoming increasingly fragmented into individual silos. Salmon aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources -- and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle. It's open, decentralized, abuse resistant, and user centric.

Speech bubble icons have become synonymous with comments. When creating yet another one for a standard comment link, it occurred to me that there might be a way to make the icon without ever opening up an image editor. It could all be done with CSS. After all, a word bubble is only two shapes a rounded rectangle and a triangle. For it to work, I just needed to add a couple tags inside the comment link.

Carrington is a CMS theme framework for WordPress that makes it easy to create unique looks for different categories, posts and comments just by creating custom templates.

I go to a website and read an article. Man, that was really great. I’d like to comment and ask the author a question. I scroll down… 384 comments. Ugh. Screw this.

When it comes to following the ebb and flow of comments on blogs, it’s easy to get lost; they’re not laid out in the thread format we see in forums, but in a linear hoppity-skip way that makes a consistent flow of discussion almost impossible to maintain. One comment might not draw a response for a month, by which time fifty other comments may separate the initial post and its follow up. This is the issue I think I’ve dealt with.