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?
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)