Tag: Communities
I used to see these things all the time several months ago but it seemed like Del.icio.us had got the hang of it and cleared out the idiots.
Today it looks like the spammers are back. In today’s most popular links on Delicious, 6 of the top 25 most popular links all go to one web site and were all first saved by spammer buddayoga871.
How to spot a spammer: the user name is one or two words followed by a number. Red flags should immediately go up. Further investigation into their linking habits will confirm or deny their spamminess. There’s probably a nice algorithm somewhere that can sniff these things out. Might be an interesting project for a computer science class.
No! Make it stop! You never, never, ever put comments in reverse chronological order as the default format on a blog. Never.
Why?
A blog is nothing more than repurposed forum software in which only one person is allowed to post topics and everyone else is allowed to post responses. (Usually. There are multi-author blogs but exclusivity of authorship is still part of the deal.)
A single blog post is like a forum topic. The original poster—in this case, the blog author—writes the topic. Just like a forum, if anyone cares to respond, they write a comment after the original post.
Once a person responds with a comment, the topic is no longer a monologue. It has become a conversation between and among the original author and anyone else who responds. Comments, just like face to face conversations, sometimes also take on a life of their own apart from the original topic, sprouting new threads of thought and conversation which may have only a tiny relationship to the original topic.
Now, imagine going to your favorite forum, clicking a link to a topic, and then being forced to click to page 6 of the responses and going backwards from there in order to begin understanding how the most recent response came to be and how it might possibly be related to the original post. Madness!
Because of this, the only natural way to display comments (in English, that is) for anyone reading the conversation for the first time is to display them in chronological order. Outside of clever methods of interface design, the simplest way to solve this is to write left to right and top to bottom. Even though it may not be linear in thought, a conversation is always linear in time.
A Case of Incorrect Form Following Function
The reason many people display comments in reverse chronological order is because they want to show what’s new at the top. The problem is twofold: they are trying to make the list of comments perform two functions and they are not solving the desired function with the best form.
The primary function of a list of comments is to facilitate a conversation. New comments come after old comments. Again, in English we write left to right and top to bottom. Always remember that: the primary function of a list of comments is to facilitate a conversation.
Reverse chronological comments, however, are trying to make a list of comments perform a secondary function, “Show me what’s new in this conversation.” The form they have chosen to solve this function is, “Display a chronological conversation in reverse chronological sequence.” While this solves the problem for exactly one case, the case in which a person has read every comment except the last one, this makes no sense at all for any other case.
Solutions
There are many ways to show people what’s new. Currently, the two most popular are RSS feeds for comments and email notification. There are also several third-party web services that track conversations in comments and attempt to display them intelligently. Another way would be to allow people to sort the list of comments based on time (with chronological order as the default).
While it’s true that some people display recent comments on the index page of a blog, this has an entirely different purpose. The purpose is to show what’s popular by showing what’s recent. In doing so, blog owners are hoping you’ll be intrigued by the latest comment, click the link to read the related post, and join the conversation. But there is absolutely no way you can understand the conversation by reading the most recent comment out of its context.
There is probably much more that could be said about this: the technical details, the usability issues, the lovely diagrams with lines and arrows showing page flow, but I’ll leave that to someone else. I’ve said my peace.
If I encounter reverse chronological comments on your blog, I’m not reading the comments. Sorry, it’s not worth my time.
I attended Startup Weekend in Boulder, Colorado this past weekend and I’d like to encourage everyone and anyone looking to start any kind of company to attend one if they bring the event close to your town.
The format of the weekend is like this: you gather together Friday night, meet awesome people, propose ideas, gather enough support for your idea (in terms of human capital), and then spend the rest of the weekend assembling your idea.
On Friday night there were roughly 100 people in a small lecture classroom on CU’s campus. All of them are smart, motivated, tech-focused people, the kind of people you always hope you get a chance to work with, unless you’re already working for a startup of some kind, in which case, you probably already are. Everyone’s on Twitter and/or Facebook and/or every other social web service. Everyone reads the same people you read or knows someone you should be reading. Everyone knows the same current events on the web you know or knows something you should know. Some of them have flown across the country to attend.
I pitched a few ideas but ultimately decided to work with a small group that wanted to create a poor man’s content failover service for web sites that receive unexpected Digg/Slashdot traffic. We called it Hitsurance. By 11pm Friday night we had our idea, a name registered, and a dedicated server set up with a splash page and email submission form. I went home and crashed with my brain racing away on ideas well into the night. I woke up twice to write some notes. Needless to say, sleep was fitful.
We worked Saturday from 9 to 9 and got about half way there. We had a design, a logo, the basic premise for the demo fleshed out, a blog, SEO research completed, Google Apps for Your Domain acquired, a Twitter account, and some of the backend scripting in place.
All work and no play would be boring, of course, so part of Saturday the attendees spent time socializing, working, eating, and bouncing ideas. We had a short concert from local singer/songwriter Reed Foehl, which was unexpected and strangely appropriate. By the end of Saturday most of us were fried. I went home and crashed but again, didn’t sleep very well.
We returned Sunday and worked from noon to 7, finishing up as much of the demo as we could. We got the service working around 6:30pm with just enough time to eat and do some fine-tuning before the group demo session at 7. Our demo worked as expected and, dare I say it, the site and the signup experience look pretty sharp considering we started from nothing Friday night. As for the future of the service, my co-founders and I are still discussing it. It’s definitely a useful service and a win-win all around. Content producers keep their audiences going and hosting providers stave off potential server crashes, which makes the rest of their customers happy.
You can read about the other groups at the Startup Weekend re-cap. I think the Web2Splash idea is both cool and useful. I’m also interested in seeing the IMDB for Podcasts go forward. It would mesh really well with one of the ideas I proposed. If Jetrecord doesn’t take up all of my time I might contact Andy in the future.
Now how much would you pay?! If the whole experience of building a product over a weekend with good people is not enough, all the groups got to pitch their ideas and chat with Loïc Le Meur, Jeff Pulver, Guy Kawasaki, Eric Litman, and Stowe Boyd, each individually. Where else do you get a guaranteed chance to do that, especially with an idea you just came up with the night before? All for $40?
I had a great time meeting and working with everyone and to boot I got to use a few Perl libraries that I haven’t tried before.
Again, I highly recommend it to anyone thinking about starting their own company, especially one with a web focus. But any type of high tech idea is a good fit for this event.