Month: February 2008

On blog comments

How do you track the conversations that go on in comments around the blogosphere? It’s easy enough to know what the actual blogs themselves are doing, after all – we have our feed readers, Google’s blog search and technorati. We have trackbacks and pings to let us know when people are linking to us on their sites. But what about the hidden conversations that are happening in the comments?

There are two angles to this. For example, it annoys me that when I comment on someone else’s blog, I am leaving content there that isn’t aggregated on my blog. I see DavePress as my little hub on the web, from which you can find out what I am doing elsewhere, on Twitter, or del.icio.us, or Flickr. I have a widget on this blog that displays the latest comments here – I’d also like one that displays my latest comments elsewhere.

This might be a fairly selfish thing to want, but the ability to do this has more practical advantages too. If we want people, whether public servants or those working for private enterprises, to engage with bloggers and to respond to them we really ought to be providing a way for those responses to be easily tracked.

Likewise, when a discussion is going on around an issue, with lots of stuff in the comments, how can that be tracked, or even found in the first place? You can subscribe to comment feeds I guess, but if you do that with every blog you’ll end up with twice as many feeds as you have already…

I think this could be a really important issue if we are to start using blogs as consultation mediums.

I suppose one possible answer is that we abandon comments altogether, and instead everyone responds to everyone else via blog entries, linking to the original.  I have read of some bloggers turning off the comments on their site for exactly this reason.

It’s a funny decision to make, actually, whether to start your own post on a subject or whether to respond in the comments. I don’t think I have a hard and fixed rule about it, maybe it just comes down to how much I have to say on a topic.

Does anyone have any ideas on how we can track comment conversations – whether our own or those we are interested in? What could change to make it easier?

Polling day

DavePress pollEvery day, WordPress and the community around it manages to surprise and delight me more. I have mentioned how it can be used to consult before, specifically by using the amazing CommentPress theme. But you can also create small polls to run on your site too, whether on a page of their own or by running in the sidebar.

This is done using the Democracy plugin, which is really easy to set up and deploy. It allows you to set the options, or give voters the ability to add their own. IP addresses can be logged to stop multiple votes, and you can store an archive of polls on a page.

I am running a quick example on this site asking readers how they access the content on this blog. OK, so it probably isn’t very scientific, but it’s fun, and another great example of the flexibility, and sheer genius, that is WordPress and the people that use it.

barcampukgovweb Developments

barcampukgovwebThe community that formed around the barcamp for uk gov web types (hence the name) has been working hard to start developing idea and connections that can start to have a real beneficial effect on the way that public services are using the web as a medium for communication and collaboration.

One of the ways this is working is through the Google Group, which is seeing some interesting discussions and some germs of top quality ideas are starting to emerge.

The trick is to capture these ideas and the various links and put them in a space where collaboration can start to happen. This can now be achieved using the GovHack wiki, set up by Adam McGreggor. A section for projects has been created, and once the discussions on the mailing list reach a point where it’s appropriate to do so, a page is created on the wiki to allow the ‘work’ to begin.

So, things are moving gradually, but at least they are moving. Mini-meets, like yesterday’s in a cafe at the House of Fraser store in Victoria, London, can only help as ideas are bandied about and possible solutions demonstrated. We need to ensure, though, that as much is documented as possible, so those that can’t engage face-to-face can still use the mailing list and the wiki to get involved.

I think it’s amazing that this is taking off in the way it has – fine, it’s incremental and evolutionary rather than there being any massive quick developments – but hey! maybe that’s just the British way. And there’s nowt wrong with that.

WordPress is a platform

WordPressSimon Dickson points to a new theme that turns WordPress into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. This confirms to me something that I have been thinking for a while that WordPress is no longer a blogging system, nor a content management system, but actually a platform upon which applications can be built.

Let’s take the evidence:

  • CommentPress turns WordPress into a super consultation platform by allowing readers to comment paragraph by paragraph on documents presented as posts on the blog
  • Prologue turns WordPress into a Twitter clone, allowing users to post very short messages as a cool way of keeping people in touch with one another. If you want to engage with Twitter-lke technology then this is a great way of being able to do it on your own terms
  • Now WPContactManager, as I mentioned above, turns WordPress into a CRM.

This is the advantage of open source software, of course, that because people have access to the innards of the system, they can understand how it works and put it to innovative uses. Of course, the flexibility of WordPress certainly helps, with themes and plugins being used to achieve much of these innovations.

It will be interesting to see what other applications based on WP start to emerge.

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