One of the great perks to researching the blogosphere for Kosmix is a chance to catch some of the new innovations in blog widgets. Thanks to a recent snipperoo post, I discovered LineBuzz, an inline commenting widget. With some help, LineBuzz is now integrated with BlogSchmog.
The strengths of this concept of contextual commenting are twofold. First, any given post can generate multiple threads of conversation, such as asking for clarification, reaction to a specific comment, negating or correcting something written, or providing links to related pages. It also may become a nice way to augment a previous post with footnotes, updates and links to newer posts by the author. This might happen in a single-threaded post, but the longer the thread gets the more jumbled each comment’s context becomes.
Second, this is another way to mine community. By watching more than your own MyBuzz stream, the growing community can help you find interesting mini-conversations or new blogs based mainly on usership within the LineBuzz community. It’s a new form of content discovery.
I suspect the barrier to entry is also a little lower, too. With no loading of multiple pages to get something added, it may seem “easier” for someone to contribute a content. [There is a little captcha-esque code that attempts to prove one’s humanity before your comment is allowed to be added—something I generally don’t like or need, thanks to Akismet.] That ease of use may also lead to spommenting and other abuses, so that is a big monster to watch for as the LineBuzz community develops.
There are other problems, of course. The tool currently can’t be customized to fit the design of a given blog. For instance, I would like to be able to adjust the spacing and background color of the sidebar comment area. That will come at some point. The tech also assumes that every domain is a different blog requiring a different key, but this blog is reachable from several domains, technically, even though only two are used. The developers were extra speeding in fixing my main concern—blogschmog.net vs. blogschmog.com—but that isn’t scalable to include the other ways of getting here. I’m interested to see if the changing content on this first page will carry over to the individual post pages in the archive. For example, if I tag a word in the excerpts on the right of the home page, will they show up in the post? I’m guessing that I’ll probably have to pull LineBuzz from the front page and just use it in the archives.
Comment away!
