Breathe In, Breathe Out

Where Do Comments Belong?

Slow Saturday, so there's a kind of tempest in a teapot about blog comments and where they belong. Louis Gray started it out by asking Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners Ire? He's talking about the increasingly available option of posting comments about a blog post on social bookmarking sites (Friendfeed, for example). One of the problems with this practice is that the comments don't show up on the blog, and so the author might never see them.

Divorcing comments from the post they're commenting on doesn't make a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, social bookmarking sites are their own feed aggregators and take advantage of the connections in the networks of people using them.

Dave Winer wrote a little bit about this on his blog today. But he also mentioned a way the RSS 2.0 standard can support direct comments to the blog. And he demonstrated with a screenshot of one that does.

I tried it out, and lo and behold, it does. And I wondered if other aggregators offered a similar feature. The only one I could find was NetNewsWire. If you right click on a headline in NNW's headline list one of the contextual menu options is "open comments." At least it is on some blogs, but not all. So NNW must be using the RSS 2.0 tag that Winer talked about.

I think this would be a useful option for any aggregator, desktop or web-based. In the meantime, I've signed up for Disqus comments hosting that offers a way of coordinating comments.

What do you think?

TWIT on Journalism, Twitter

This Week in Tech or TWIT as it's known, is a podcast focused on, well, technical news of the week. As such, it's usually not that exiciting, though it does serve a purpose.

image by chodhound, via Flickr (CC license)

But the episode I listened to today broke the pattern. Host Leo Laporte and guests discussed the future of journalism, online and traditional. What made this stand out for me was the discussion wasn't coming from the usual suspects, traditional journalists. Instead, it was veteran content providers from he online information flood that continues to flow over the banks.

Stating the obvious usually doesn't count for much, but I found it refreshing when the panel agreed that most blogs are, at best, secondary sources of news. They are simply commenting or expanding upon the stuff uncovered by primary journalists - the men and women who dig up topics, research and filter them before presenting them to the public. So if the flow of financing for traditional journalism switches to secondary online sources, where does that leave us? Don't know about you, but I don't want to depend on Huffington Post as my primary source of news.

There were other discussions on meat and potatoes reporting subdizing stuff like international news: think New York Times. And of course recognizing how much times goes down the drain as the Twitter stream flows by. I'm starting to see a really big ratio of 'stuff I can't use' to 'stuff I can use.' Still, it's fun to watch the flow - sometimes.

As I think about this stuff, I'm leaning toward the idea of online delivery mainly supplementing local news. Let's face it, most local news doesn't take Woodward and Bernstein to report it.

If you are at all interested in online and traditional news, I wouldn't hestiate recommending a download and listen. I hope to see more TWITs like this in the future.