I’m still amazed at people and how they react to simple blog entry like this one . Why the comment about stuffing Mr Seek in a jar ? The picture is not from him … so please read what is posted before making such comments. That said, we seem to have the same problem with popular serach words such as Phénomia and Star Academie which attract random comments from lost fans.
Why is that ? Do people just forget to read or is it just to simple to post a comment ? Should there be a barrier (like a free registration) that ensure that a minimum of tough goes into posting each comment ? I know some people will argue that digital publication is the greatest thing since sliced bread for freedom of speech, and therefore we should not restrict posting an entry, but what is the use of speech if no ones reads you ?
Having an easy way to publish your comment is great if you have a way to distinguish what is relevant and what is not. But if you do not, you will eventually get lost in a sea of irrelevant comments. Any reader of site like /. have noticed this problem. Slashdot adress this problem with moderators who rank all the entries, but this information is not processed by global search engines.
Although there are still a lot of good and insightfull comments to be found on blogs, I worry that we may soon be unable to search trough the sheer volume of stupidty or irrelevant comments that gets published. What we would need is an intelligent comment search engine. Google should develop that as a extension to their services. Hell, I’m certain some people would even pay for such a service if it effectively cuts down search time.
Why not draft a RFC that would provide a technical way for seach engines to appreciate the relevance of each posting ? This would require some work from the administrators of each blog and contributive web site, but the community would benefit greatly from this. Since I’m not the technical expert here, I will leave this issues to others.
Well these where my random thoughs on this sunday morning. Hope this entry attract relevant comments !
First, I must say it again, I think the kitten picture is really cute and I’m quite confident, based on my personal hands-on experience with young felines, that no animal was hurt, psychologically or physically, while taking this picture.
Maybe I’m just a dense idiot like this guy though: http://www.canada.com/ottawa/news/story.asp?id=BC0FA8F3-2701-4909-8708-99C934DB7B8D
I also got some spam in comments a while ago but it never happened again. Referrer spam is way more common though, but since I don’t display those on a web page it does not have much an impact on anyone.
It is true that it is « risky » to open a forum for all to contribute if you want to create a uniform and controlled product. Open comments are, in theory, quite a leap of faith. In practice though, on a low traffic website like this one, the abuses, or simply non productive inputs are not much of a nuisance.
As far as people having very outspoken and obtuse opinions online, well, I always attributed it to anonymity or the development of a certain alter ego personnality. Nothing new there…
So far, I’m entertained more than annoyed. I love my « lost fans » comments!
To have a search engine deal with comments in an intelligent manner, well you’d need some kind of semantic markup. As far as I know such a method does not exist yet. Maybe Atom/Echo will support this?
http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage
But even if the comments are marked and understood by spiders as such, how to get a relevance value? You give some sort of « karma » to the posters with a moderation system? You use a friend-of-a-friend or a friendster scheme? Should I simply censor and delete comment I don’t deem worthy? Should I rate posts?
Maybe Google could implement something like what you propose with their Blogger service, eventually, when they support comments. From my own experience though, I find relevent comments are made to relevant posts and Google has no problems to fish those out for me. And I see about as many irrelevant « posts » than « comments », thanks to weblogs and the million monkeys with typewriters community which I’m a proud part of.
All things considered, I think the old Slashdot saying of « If you don’t agree, post, don’t moderate » applies quite well to blogs. Bad comments should be balanced by good comments.
I invite you to post some more Phnomia/Occupation double/etc. dirt so we can obtain a larger data set of weird comments to analyze and further discuss this issue.