Mozilla-Knight's Beyond Comment Threads Challenge
drumbeat.org
drumbeat.org
That way you weren't making little "data islands" all around the internet (that you're not likely to get back to) and there was more chance that a given idea/topic would be more thoroughly discussed. In theory!
In my view the biggest value it would have that you can track comments from sharing portals like reddit,HN and others.
Idea came by other person who don't want to subscribe email updates after leaving comment in some regular site but want to know if there are replies.
I have told about it to several people but they weren't that much excited. As it's almost ready for launch I will make it public.
If you have idea how smartly it can help someone, please let's talk :) http://comreapp.com/
I can't help but think that with all the stuff that's been thought of and implemented in commenting systems like slashdot and reddit and hacker news, that we've plateaued out, and it's time to think of systems that don't involve direct mass communication between participants.
Hacker News works alright, but if you look at Slashdot there's just so much content for so little value.
it would be really beneficial if we could have a unified commenting system that can aggregate feedbacks from all publishing mediums and social-media channels. that in itself could create a single narrative & storyline for each story/news article on a global scale.
Things like adoption of a unified comment system is really hard to manage, although companies like Disqus are doing some interesting stuff there.
http://threadit.kaizenrails.com/discussions/691
I'm experimenting with redesigning thread layout to focus on context and making it easier to follow and comprehend a complicated thread.
It's not as ambitious as other ideas out there, but I feel this is a improvement over what we have currently.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2530963
Here's the same thread in my layout:
I think the focus on news pieces as being long form text documents is fundamentally flawed. The paragraph (or proposition or whatever) is probably a more natural atomic unit, and makes a bunch of the problems currently plaguing how we interact with news content/knowledge go away.
The idea i've been thinking about, is why can't we harken back to the days of text-based adventures (really the distilled essence of user interaction), and make news queryable and navigable by users?
You get to know what your users what to know about a topic, and how they explore your content, and you can get that info w/o all the social overhead and shouting matchings.
I've often thought that the New York Times ought to be a wiki, not in the sense that it is publicly editable, but in the sense that the staff ought to be linking stuff together much more aggressively. Why isn't there a page on the New York Times I can go to that is Their Index for Guam? (Deliberately choosing a neutral topic to avoid trigger political reactions.) All their stories collected, sorted, in some chronological order, etc., with new stories added as they come in. The value of the NYT is greatly lessened by being an undifferentiated mass of articles. It would even help them in their own research.
Okay, i'm kidding. :)
The real problem with hyperlinking is that it's difficult and time consuming. Wikipedia can kinda manage it because there are thousands of Wikipedians with a lot of free time. The NYTimes is the opposite. They're a smallish organization trying to do original news reporting and research, and put it up online. Time spent deciding what hyperlinks to put where are a distraction from the other stuff they could be doing.
That's why time has been spent on systems like Apture, which are frankly, completely useless. Automated systems can't provide the sorts of editorial control that users actually want to find out more info.
In short, wikis are really hard for organizations to build and maintain, if it's not core to what it is that they do. And they're particularly hard for quick moving targets.