[melkjug-dev] Commenting on Articles (was Re: Melkjug Feedback)

[Randall Leeds]

I have two thoughts on comments.

One:
For some well known blogging platforms, could we autodiscover the comments
feed and do something smart with it?

Two:
It strikes me that Melkjug benefits from having a strong community. We
implicitly push the idea of a Melkjug community by having following, starred
by filters, etc. What about adding our own comments system? Model support
for this would be trivial: store comments as attachments on the article item
in the silo. Timestamp when people click Hide on an article and compare it
to the most recent comment time stamp lets us add a Show hidden articles
with new comments option. I think the most difficult issues around this are
becomming UI related: the question of what articles to show starts to look
more like a logical conjunction than a dropdown menu, for instance.

-Randall

[Joshua Bronson]

Post by Randall Leeds
I have two thoughts on comments.
For some well known blogging platforms, could we autodiscover the comments
feed and do something smart with it?

we could and we should!

Post by Randall Leeds
It strikes me that Melkjug benefits from having a strong community. We
implicitly push the idea of a Melkjug community by having following, starred
by filters, etc. What about adding our own comments system? Model support
for this would be trivial: store comments as attachments on the article item
in the silo. Timestamp when people click Hide on an article and compare it
to the most recent comment time stamp lets us add a Show hidden articles
with new comments option.

brilliant! while we're at it we should also timestamp starring, sharing, and
any other actions users can take on articles -- this both defines an
ordering on the ratings and probably buys us other nice properties as the
system evolves.

Post by Randall Leeds
I think the most difficult issues around this are becomming UI related: the
question of what articles to show starts to look more like a logical
conjunction than a dropdown menu, for instance.

hm, we already have a way of defining filters as arbitrary functions of
other filters... the dropdown deciding what articles to show is really just
a filter which is a function of some binary filters (starred, hidden, not).
maybe the UI could at some point just expose filter composition. if done
wrong the UI could get hairy, but if we got it right it could expose a lot
of power while unifying things quite nicely.

Post by Randall Leeds
-Randall

---------- Original thread ----------
From: Joshua Bronson <jabronson-***@public.gmane.org>
Date: Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: Melkjug Feedback
To: Tim Coulter <tcoulter-***@public.gmane.org>
Cc: melkjug.org-feedback-ZwoEplunGu1pszqg2B6Wd0B+***@public.gmane.org,
melkjug-dev-ZwoEplunGu1pszqg2B6Wd0B+***@public.gmane.org


Hey Tim,
Hm, yeah it sounds like he's misunderstanding the purpose here -- we're not
building a system specifically to facilitate discussion on blogs via
comments -- though he might know we have definitely played with and have by
no means abandoned the idea of a filter that promotes articles based on how
many comments they have (the tricky thing being normalizing based on average
traffic for the particular blog). In the meantime, it sounds like he may not
realize that most blogging software provides a separate feed for comments vs
blogposts? See for instance http://importantshock.wordpress.com/feed/ vs
http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/jquery-is-a-monad/feed/.

Anyway, thanks for the shout out to Melkjug and thanks for passing along the
feedback.

Josh

Post by Randall Leeds
Josh,
One of the commenters on that blog I told you about responded to my post
about Melkjug. His tone is a little harsh, but may be good feedback.
And in due fairness I presented Melkjug as the wrong product.
In any case, here's the feedback, and a link to the thread (scroll down,
http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/224
--------------------------------------------------------
@Tim Coulter: Oy, what a name! “Melkjug”?
I score Melkjug as a clean miss. It’s still going with the blog-and-feed
system, which disregards comment as unimportant. That being so, Melkjug
fails at the most important part of this problem, which is to bubble up
a blog topic solely because there are new comments to it.
Melkjug (I did try it) doesn’t even show me the comments, and RSS
doesn’t flag new comments, even optionally, much less keep track of
which ones I’ve already read. Melkjug’s tuners do not offer the option,
“new comments” or “comment by a particular person”. “Starred by”, yes,
“Dugg by”, yes, but not “commented by”.
Y’all couldn’t add that if you wanted to because RSS (I include Atom
here) doesn’t present any information about the contents of comments at
all.
I have to remember to manually dial up this topic, because my reader
doesn’t pop up anything new until James writes another post. Then I have
to bring up the particular post in a view that includes comments (which
my reader’s view does not), and then scroll down the comments while
trying to recollect where I left off so I can see which, if any, are new
since my last visit.
I am going through that process this for this blog and this particular
subject, but I will not do it as a matter of course or for most blogs or
subjects. Neither will most people, and so the discussion dies, not from
lack of interest, but because the mechanics of keeping up with it are
just too cumbersome.

[Philip Ashlock]

In some ways I think this presents a good argument for content platforms
to use a separate service (or just a really good api) for comment
management. There are starting to be a number of services that are
specifically designed for comments (eg http://disqus.com/) and one of
the benefits is that they can bridge comments between disparate
syndication services.

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Randall Leeds
I have two thoughts on comments.
For some well known blogging platforms, could we autodiscover the
comments feed and do something smart with it?
we could and we should!
It strikes me that Melkjug benefits from having a strong
community. We implicitly push the idea of a Melkjug community by
having following, starred by filters, etc. What about adding our
store comments as attachments on the article item in the silo.
Timestamp when people click Hide on an article and compare it to
the most recent comment time stamp lets us add a Show hidden
articles with new comments option.
brilliant! while we're at it we should also timestamp starring,
sharing, and any other actions users can take on articles -- this both
defines an ordering on the ratings and probably buys us other nice
properties as the system evolves.
I think the most difficult issues around this are becomming UI
related: the question of what articles to show starts to look more
like a logical conjunction than a dropdown menu, for instance.
hm, we already have a way of defining filters as arbitrary functions
of other filters... the dropdown deciding what articles to show is
really just a filter which is a function of some binary filters
(starred, hidden, not). maybe the UI could at some point just expose
filter composition. if done wrong the UI could get hairy, but if we
got it right it could expose a lot of power while unifying things
quite nicely.
-Randall
---------- Original thread ----------
Date: Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: Melkjug Feedback
Hey Tim,
Hm, yeah it sounds like he's misunderstanding the purpose here --
we're not building a system specifically to facilitate discussion on
blogs via comments -- though he might know we have definitely played
with and have by no means abandoned the idea of a filter that promotes
articles based on how many comments they have (the tricky thing being
normalizing based on average traffic for the particular blog). In the
meantime, it sounds like he may not realize that most blogging
software provides a separate feed for comments vs blogposts? See for
instance http://importantshock.wordpress.com/feed/ vs http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/jquery-is-a-monad/feed/.
Anyway, thanks for the shout out to Melkjug and thanks for passing
along the feedback.
Josh
Josh,
One of the commenters on that blog I told you about responded to my post
about Melkjug. His tone is a little harsh, but may be good feedback.
And in due fairness I presented Melkjug as the wrong product.
In any case, here's the feedback, and a link to the thread (scroll down,
http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/224
--------------------------------------------------------
@Tim Coulter: Oy, what a name! “Melkjug”?
I score Melkjug as a clean miss. It’s still going with the blog-and-feed
system, which disregards comment as unimportant. That being so, Melkjug
fails at the most important part of this problem, which is to bubble up
a blog topic solely because there are new comments to it.
Melkjug (I did try it) doesn’t even show me the comments, and RSS
doesn’t flag new comments, even optionally, much less keep track of
which ones I’ve already read. Melkjug’s tuners do not offer the option,
“new comments” or “comment by a particular person”. “Starred by”, yes,
“Dugg by”, yes, but not “commented by”.
Y’all couldn’t add that if you wanted to because RSS (I include Atom
here) doesn’t present any information about the contents of comments at
all.
I have to remember to manually dial up this topic, because my reader
doesn’t pop up anything new until James writes another post. Then I have
to bring up the particular post in a view that includes comments (which
my reader’s view does not), and then scroll down the comments while
trying to recollect where I left off so I can see which, if any, are new
since my last visit.
I am going through that process this for this blog and this particular
subject, but I will not do it as a matter of course or for most blogs or
subjects. Neither will most people, and so the discussion dies, not from
lack of interest, but because the mechanics of keeping up with it are
just too cumbersome.

[Randall Leeds]

Post by Joshua Bronson
brilliant! while we're at it we should also timestamp starring, sharing,
and any other actions users can take on articles -- this both defines an
ordering on the ratings and probably buys us other nice properties as the
system evolves.

According to http://trac.openplans.org/melkjug/ticket/246 we are now
timestamping the 'Star' action in order to have predictable ordering on the
starred items view. I agree that this pattern should probably continue as we
add more actions and we should also add this behavior to the 'Hide' action.
I created a ticket for 'Hide': http://trac.openplans.org/melkjug/ticket/383

[Luke Tucker]

I think as you say understanding the handful of major blogging
platforms would take us most of the way to doing most stuff with
comments. They're probably pretty sensible. What exactly we intend to
do with them is another story... As a first step I'd still like to
visit the very simple idea of comment counting possibly against an
average for the source: http://trac.openplans.org/melkjug/ticket/39 as
a way of locating interesting articles.

Tracking/managing external conversations seems like a fairly hefty
separate problem to me. That's not to say we don't have a ton of
stuff that's applicable to solving the problem already though. I feel
like although you could dump in the comment feeds for any article and
deal with them like articles, that's really not ideal -- comments have
structure and relation to one another in a way posts normally
don't... it would also be sort of crazy to try to sort out what was
going on if you mixed together the comments of even a few posts you
were trying to follow -- I think you'd want to look at them as a way
more typical form/emaily group without switching context alot. Most
of the interest metrics wouldn't apply beyond maybe bayesian thingers
based on the text. I think it would demand a separate ui for
presenting them in relation to the article they came from.

I would say bubbling up old articles with new comments might be best
as a different sort of "mode/view" altogether -- looking for news vs.
tracking things that you've already found, coupled with starred items
and search somehow. If you wanted to cobble it into the current UI, I
think the way to go would might be to have a "New Comments" or "Active
Conversation" tuner that you turn up or down depending on whether you
were trying to see those and then set your drop-down to "show hidden
if starred" rather than having it as a part of that drop-down. That
drop-down shouldn't get any more complicated in my opinion it should
probably just be a checkbox for showing hidden items (esp now that
there is a starred view) Adding search should eventually be another
foot in the grave for that thing.

As for integrating internal commenting... I think it deserves some
thought. Part of me thinks it would be strange to sort of tear any of
the conversation away from the blog itself, but if I think in the
melkjug-as-planet sort of product it would be... kind of interesting,
ie planetdev.openplans.org with the conversation of planetdev readers
collected around it. I feel like there may be some way of saying to a
blog hey there's a side conversation happening at this other site...
but not very well supported. Any wordpress gurus know? What goes on
with this sort of stuff in the blog-network sort of world?

- Luke

Post by Randall Leeds
I have two thoughts on comments.
For some well known blogging platforms, could we autodiscover the
comments feed and do something smart with it?
It strikes me that Melkjug benefits from having a strong community.
We implicitly push the idea of a Melkjug community by having
following, starred by filters, etc. What about adding our own
comments system? Model support for this would be trivial: store
comments as attachments on the article item in the silo. Timestamp
when people click Hide on an article and compare it to the most
recent comment time stamp lets us add a Show hidden articles with
new comments option. I think the most difficult issues around this
are becomming UI related: the question of what articles to show
starts to look more like a logical conjunction than a dropdown menu,
for instance.
-Randall

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[Randall Leeds]

As for integrating internal commenting... I think it deserves some thought.
Part of me thinks it would be strange to sort of tear any of the
conversation away from the blog itself, but if I think in the
melkjug-as-planet sort of product it would be... kind of interesting, ie
planetdev.openplans.org with the conversation of planetdev readers
collected around it. I feel like there may be some way of saying to a blog
hey there's a side conversation happening at this other site... but not
very well supported. Any wordpress gurus know? What goes on with this sort
of stuff in the blog-network sort of world?

There is and it's called Trackback. If we ping the trackback URL then the
blog can automatically link back to a page on Melkjug that has comments
people have left there.

However, this conversation has made me think through these ideas a little
more and I've decided what we're looking at are two separate ideas.

Idea 1:
I referred to this idea as commenting 'on Melkjug'. I think the use of the
verb 'comment' here though has confused it with the notion of commenting 'on
the post'. Indeed, I think I was confused myself.

Leaving comments on the original feed is important and clean and we should
rethink this first idea as a "share on Melkjug with note" function which has
analogy in Google Reader. (Whether these could be threaded is a fun, but
tangential issue.) Seeing which other Melk-people shared an article I'm
reading and what they said would be fun and could help people identify other
users to follow. It should not subsume the feed's native comment support.

Idea 2:
Scrape comments off the original post to display (read-only) on Melkjug.

I suspect it'd be difficult to widely support commenting 'on a post' from
Melkjug and I think we should *not* do this. In the case of Disqus people
need to log into Disqus to post their comments. We should not try to tackle
this sort of integration. Instead, we can just scrape out the comments to
display them on Melkjug for popular platforms and this would be sufficient
for reading. Adding the 'New Comments' filter Luke suggested would be
sufficient for basic conversation tracking.

Disqus users could continue to track through Disqus after having opened the
original post, logged into Disqus, and posted their comment. 'Share with
note on Melkjug' would be good for community building and personal
notetaking, but entirely separate from the dialogue of comments on the post
itself.

On the topic of Disqus:
A first look at Disqus makes me think that from Melkjug's point of view this
is just a different format of comment to pick up. In other words, where we
might normally see a wordpress blog and pick up its comments, we'll see a
Disqus-enabled blog and we'll need to pick up the Disqus thread. If we did
implement something like a 'New Comments' filter, this would be an
independent and primitive way for Melkjug users to track a dialogue,
irrespective of Disqus integration on the feed in question.

-Randall

[Philip Ashlock]

Post by Luke Tucker
As for integrating internal commenting... I think it deserves some
thought. Part of me thinks it would be strange to sort of tear
any of the conversation away from the blog itself, but if I think
in the melkjug-as-planet sort of product it would be... kind of
interesting, ie planetdev.openplans.org
<http://planetdev.openplans.org> with the conversation of
planetdev readers collected around it. I feel like there may be
some way of saying to a blog hey there's a side conversation
happening at this other site... but not very well supported. Any
wordpress gurus know? What goes on with this sort of stuff in the
blog-network sort of world?
There is and it's called Trackback. If we ping the trackback URL then
the blog can automatically link back to a page on Melkjug that has
comments people have left there.
However, this conversation has made me think through these ideas a
little more and I've decided what we're looking at are two separate ideas.
I referred to this idea as commenting 'on Melkjug'. I think the use of
the verb 'comment' here though has confused it with the notion of
commenting 'on the post'. Indeed, I think I was confused myself.
Leaving comments on the original feed is important and clean and we
should rethink this first idea as a "share on Melkjug with note"
function which has analogy in Google Reader. (Whether these could be
threaded is a fun, but tangential issue.) Seeing which other
Melk-people shared an article I'm reading and what they said would be
fun and could help people identify other users to follow. It should
not subsume the feed's native comment support.
Scrape comments off the original post to display (read-only) on Melkjug.
I suspect it'd be difficult to widely support commenting 'on a post'
from Melkjug and I think we should *not* do this. In the case of
Disqus people need to log into Disqus to post their comments. We
should not try to tackle this sort of integration.

I totally agree with your focus and reasoning on this, but just as an
FYI, you already tackled the login issue by supporting OpenID. So if I
associated the same OpenID with my Disqus account there is no additional
login. Many WP sites also support commenting with a simple OpenID
login, so the case should be the same there. Obviously integrating with
external comment systems would really only be practical if there was an
established open standard for doing so and I don't think there is yet...

Post by Luke Tucker
Instead, we can just scrape out the comments to display them on
Melkjug for popular platforms and this would be sufficient for
reading. Adding the 'New Comments' filter Luke suggested would be
sufficient for basic conversation tracking.
Disqus users could continue to track through Disqus after having
opened the original post, logged into Disqus, and posted their
comment. 'Share with note on Melkjug' would be good for community
building and personal notetaking, but entirely separate from the
dialogue of comments on the post itself.
A first look at Disqus makes me think that from Melkjug's point of
view this is just a different format of comment to pick up. In other
words, where we might normally see a wordpress blog and pick up its
comments, we'll see a Disqus-enabled blog and we'll need to pick up
the Disqus thread. If we did implement something like a 'New Comments'
filter, this would be an independent and primitive way for Melkjug
users to track a dialogue, irrespective of Disqus integration on the
feed in question.
-Randall

[Luke Tucker]

Post by Randall Leeds
Leaving comments on the original feed is important and clean and we
should rethink this first idea as a "share on Melkjug with note"
function which has analogy in Google Reader. (Whether these could be
threaded is a fun, but tangential issue.) Seeing which other Melk-
people shared an article I'm reading and what they said would be fun
and could help people identify other users to follow. It should not
subsume the feed's native comment support.

Yeah I agree that would be a nice enhancement -- I think of delicious
here too. Presentation is the tricky part to me. I don't really want
something that would drag you away from the main view... It would be
kind of cool as a little expander that opens up in the regular view of
an article. UI folks?

Post by Randall Leeds
Scrape comments off the original post to display (read-only) on Melkjug.
I suspect it'd be difficult to widely support commenting 'on a post'
from Melkjug and I think we should *not* do this. In the case of
Disqus people need to log into Disqus to post their comments. We
should not try to tackle this sort of integration. Instead, we can
just scrape out the comments to display them on Melkjug for popular
platforms and this would be sufficient for reading. Adding the 'New
Comments' filter Luke suggested would be sufficient for basic
conversation tracking.
Disqus users could continue to track through Disqus after having
opened the original post, logged into Disqus, and posted their
comment. 'Share with note on Melkjug' would be good for community
building and personal notetaking, but entirely separate from the
dialogue of comments on the post itself.
A first look at Disqus makes me think that from Melkjug's point of
view this is just a different format of comment to pick up. In other
words, where we might normally see a wordpress blog and pick up its
comments, we'll see a Disqus-enabled blog and we'll need to pick up
the Disqus thread. If we did implement something like a 'New
Comments' filter, this would be an independent and primitive way for
Melkjug users to track a dialogue, irrespective of Disqus
integration on the feed in question.

I think disqus is pretty interesting. It doesn't look like they
presently support reading comments from other people's "forums"
through the API, but it looks like they're of two minds about which
way to go with that. Keep your eyes peeled for that...

For now I think they'd mainly be useful for offloading internal
comment functionality if we wanted a really rich discussion inside a
melkjug. Like phil says login stuff is mitigated by OpenID and to
make comments you don't actually need to log in there (you can claim
them later if you do have an account and don't log in) Their stuff is
pretty nice and the API for hooking into it looks pretty easy.

It's annoying that it's a centralized closed-source service although
they profess openness etc. etc. I guess talking through an API
somewhat alleviates that in the worst case, but there is still some
question as to who owns comments. It's also annoying requirement for
the product as a whole since you need to do an off-site setup per-
domain to make it work. I think it would have to be more of a plug-in
option like in wordpress. Could be a pretty fast short-term win though.

- Luke

[Anil Makhijani]

Just released: comments for google reader.

http://lifehacker.com/5168606/google-reader-lets-you-comment-on-feed-items-for-other-reader-users

Post by Randall Leeds
Leaving comments on the original feed is important and clean and we should
rethink this first idea as a "share on Melkjug with note" function which has
analogy in Google Reader. (Whether these could be threaded is a fun, but
tangential issue.) Seeing which other Melk-people shared an article I'm
reading and what they said would be fun and could help people identify other
users to follow. It should not subsume the feed's native comment support.
Yeah I agree that would be a nice enhancement -- I think of delicious here
too.  Presentation is the tricky part to me.
 I don't really want something that would drag you away from the main view...
 It would be kind of cool as a little expander that opens up in the regular
view of an article. UI folks?
Scrape comments off the original post to display (read-only) on Melkjug.
I suspect it'd be difficult to widely support commenting 'on a post' from
Melkjug and I think we should *not* do this. In the case of Disqus people
need to log into Disqus to post their comments. We should not try to tackle
this sort of integration. Instead, we can just scrape out the comments to
display them on Melkjug for popular platforms and this would be sufficient
for reading. Adding the 'New Comments' filter Luke suggested would be
sufficient for basic conversation tracking.
Disqus users could continue to track through Disqus after having opened the
original post, logged into Disqus, and posted their comment. 'Share with
note on Melkjug' would be good for community building and personal
notetaking, but entirely separate from the dialogue of comments on the post
itself.
A first look at Disqus makes me think that from Melkjug's point of view this
is just a different format of comment to pick up. In other words, where we
might normally see a wordpress blog and pick up its comments, we'll see a
Disqus-enabled blog and we'll need to pick up the Disqus thread. If we did
implement something like a 'New Comments' filter, this would be an
independent and primitive way for Melkjug users to track a dialogue,
irrespective of Disqus integration on the feed in question.
I think disqus is pretty interesting.  It doesn't look like they presently
support reading comments from other people's "forums" through the API, but
it looks like they're of two minds about which way to go with that.  Keep
your eyes peeled for that...
For now I think they'd mainly be useful for offloading internal comment
functionality if we wanted a really rich discussion inside a melkjug.  Like
phil says login stuff is mitigated by OpenID and to make comments you don't
actually need to log in there (you can claim them later if you do have an
account and don't log in)  Their stuff is pretty nice and the API for
hooking into it looks pretty easy.
It's annoying that it's a centralized closed-source service although they
profess openness etc. etc.  I guess talking through an API somewhat
alleviates that in the worst case, but there is still some question as to
who owns comments.  It's also annoying requirement for the product as a
whole since you need to do an off-site setup per-domain to make it work.  I
think it would have to be more of a plug-in option like in wordpress.  Could
be a pretty fast short-term win though.
- Luke

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[Randall Leeds]

So I'm not the only one who thinks this is a good idea.
greader restricts these comments to viewable only by your google contacts.
I like that making them melkjug-public would create a melkjug community, but
on the other hand I guess this stresses the tension between melkjug comments
and comments on source, so that's a good argument not to open them up.

To start a little bit of a tangential discussion, what other ways can we get
melkjug users to discover each other in an explicit, community dialogue way
(rather than a collective intelligence way).

1) Starred by
2) Shared by
3) ...

Post by Anil Makhijani
Just released: comments for google reader.
http://lifehacker.com/5168606/google-reader-lets-you-comment-on-feed-items-for-other-reader-users

Post by Randall Leeds
Leaving comments on the original feed is important and clean and we

should

Post by Randall Leeds
rethink this first idea as a "share on Melkjug with note" function which

has

Post by Randall Leeds
analogy in Google Reader. (Whether these could be threaded is a fun, but
tangential issue.) Seeing which other Melk-people shared an article I'm
reading and what they said would be fun and could help people identify

other

Post by Randall Leeds
users to follow. It should not subsume the feed's native comment support.
Yeah I agree that would be a nice enhancement -- I think of delicious

here

Post by Randall Leeds
too. Presentation is the tricky part to me.

I don't really want something that would drag you away from the main view...

Post by Randall Leeds
It would be kind of cool as a little expander that opens up in the

regular

Post by Randall Leeds
view of an article. UI folks?
Scrape comments off the original post to display (read-only) on Melkjug.
I suspect it'd be difficult to widely support commenting 'on a post' from
Melkjug and I think we should *not* do this. In the case of Disqus people
need to log into Disqus to post their comments. We should not try to

tackle

Post by Randall Leeds
this sort of integration. Instead, we can just scrape out the comments to
display them on Melkjug for popular platforms and this would be

sufficient

Post by Randall Leeds
for reading. Adding the 'New Comments' filter Luke suggested would be
sufficient for basic conversation tracking.
Disqus users could continue to track through Disqus after having opened

the

Post by Randall Leeds
original post, logged into Disqus, and posted their comment. 'Share with
note on Melkjug' would be good for community building and personal
notetaking, but entirely separate from the dialogue of comments on the

post

Post by Randall Leeds
itself.
A first look at Disqus makes me think that from Melkjug's point of view

this

Post by Randall Leeds
is just a different format of comment to pick up. In other words, where

we

Post by Randall Leeds
might normally see a wordpress blog and pick up its comments, we'll see a
Disqus-enabled blog and we'll need to pick up the Disqus thread. If we

did

Post by Randall Leeds
implement something like a 'New Comments' filter, this would be an
independent and primitive way for Melkjug users to track a dialogue,
irrespective of Disqus integration on the feed in question.
I think disqus is pretty interesting. It doesn't look like they

presently

Post by Randall Leeds
support reading comments from other people's "forums" through the API,

but

Post by Randall Leeds
it looks like they're of two minds about which way to go with that. Keep
your eyes peeled for that...
For now I think they'd mainly be useful for offloading internal comment
functionality if we wanted a really rich discussion inside a melkjug.

Like

Post by Randall Leeds
phil says login stuff is mitigated by OpenID and to make comments you

don't

Post by Randall Leeds
actually need to log in there (you can claim them later if you do have an
account and don't log in) Their stuff is pretty nice and the API for
hooking into it looks pretty easy.
It's annoying that it's a centralized closed-source service although they
profess openness etc. etc. I guess talking through an API somewhat
alleviates that in the worst case, but there is still some question as to
who owns comments. It's also annoying requirement for the product as a
whole since you need to do an off-site setup per-domain to make it work.

I

Post by Randall Leeds
think it would have to be more of a plug-in option like in wordpress.

Could

Post by Randall Leeds
be a pretty fast short-term win though.
- Luke

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