Facilitating conversations

[John McMellen]

I have a half an idea bouncing around in my head. I was reading a
story this morning (courtesy of John Proffitt) about news sites
rethinking anonymous commenting. I wasn't thinking so much about
commenting policy as how comments and conversation take place in many
different places, and they don't always generate lots of comments on a
station's website.

Wouldn't it be neat if, instead of trying to force people to log in or
comment on my website on a story, I could give them some kind of embed
code or text that they could put in their blog or story or forum that
would create a link back to the original (I know, it sounds like
pingbacks) but in a way that comments could flow back and forth
between any of the linked up sites. So the story serves to link up
seemingly separate islands of conversation in an opt-in way, with the
story at the center. Maybe the embedded code could fetch comments and
display them on whatever page it is inserted into.

It sounds hard to do, but the techniques needed I find fascinating.
What are your thoughts? Is there anything like this already in use?

John McMellen
KSMU Radio

[Brady Carlson]

John - is what you're envisioning like what Disqus does?

Brady
NHPR

John McMellen
KSMU Radio

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[Jonathan Coffman]

It does sound a little bit like what Disqus is doing... But is definitely different.

Right now Disqus is essentially searching for references to the URL of the page upon which it’s installed on the various social networks — when it finds those mentions it pulls them in and displays them. However, those mentions are not currently manageable by moderators, which isn’t usually an issue but you never know.

For the folks on this list at PBS stations or shows: we recently inked a deal with Disqus to provide PBS.org, station, and program web sites with unlimited access to the Disqus premium platform via our national account. Let me know if you are interested in getting started.

-Jonathan

-Jonathan
__________________________________________________________
Jonathan Coffman
Product Manager, Social Media
http://www.pbs.org
Twitter: @jdcoffman

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[Leng Caloh]

I love this idea.

 

Jonathan, how does Disqus display the social network comments? We might be interested in it for our site, but we already have a built-in user base with our existing integrated commenting system. Is it possible to just use the Disqus Reactions feature?

 

Thanks,

Leng

 

 

Leng Caloh
Convergence Editor
Office: (619) 594-8509
Mobile: (619) 861-0715


5200 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA  92182-5400
www.kpbs.org | Mobile site: m.kpbs.org

[Chris Beer]

I really like the idea of embedding pingback services in pages (even
if that ping-back isn't automatically displayed). While it is probably
less fool-proof than a service like Disqus, it does things in a
slightly less mystical and more user-controlled way. Figuring out how
to aggregate relevant comments, though, certainly sounds hard without
a service like Disqus (but maybe pubsubhubbub will save us all?)

Chris Beer
WGBH Interactive

[John McMellen]

Interesting you mention pubsubhubbub. I was just reading about it the other day and thought the same thing.


John McMellen
417-597-3420

[Jonathan Coffman]

Have any of you done any testing or experimentation with PubSubHubBub? It seems to be catching on as a way to facilitate real-time updates to web-content.

-Jonathan

__________________________________________________________
Jonathan Coffman
Product Manager, Social Media
http://www.pbs.org

http://www.jonathancoffman.com
Twitter: @jdcoffman and @pbs