wwp@yahoogroups.com:
trackbacks- pingbacks - diggs - syndication
yuval levy 2007-Jan-03 14:19:00
I see passion flaring up with opinions for and against
comments and ratings.
The most compelling reasons I read are:
SW> We should have comments because contributors
SW> are asking for comments.
Comments and feedbacks have become integral part of
the Web 2.0. Those familiar with the blogging culture
knows the meanings of trackbacks and pingbacks and
diggs and the likes.
JNM> The WWP is a sampler. It takes a sample of what
is
JNM> happening on the earth ?n a certain week on a
JNM> certain topic.
The same can be said of blogs and the Web 2.0 in
general. And some of them invite comments while some
of them don't.
Learning from what happened and is happening in the
blogging community is worth considering.
State-of-the art blogs set a default to have or not
comments and let the author override the option for
every single entry in his blog.
EK> Approving prior to publication yes, only delete
EK> unwelcome no. Who would do that on a regular
basis?
Technically, all of those feedback techniques are
threatened by spam and bad user behavior. The latter
is easier to control than the first. The question
raised above is fundamental. There are plenty of
abandoned, stale blogs and forums out there, and I do
not want to see this happening to the WWP.
Socially the verdict is still open whether these web
based feedback tools have helped growing and knitting
a community or if they have just fragmented it and
diluted it.
The signal to noise ratio on most forums and feedback
tools makes them more or less useless if they are not
tightly managed / moderated.
BV> i check the access stats from time to time.
Even access stats have been abused by spammers, to
feed spam links in the referrers, hoping that someone
sees them and clicks them.
Most rating systems tend to revert to the mean, i.e.
when there is a statistically significant number of
voters, they end up predictably with most entries
rated at the mean vote.
EK> The most popular VR sites panoramas.dk, vrmag and
EK> arounder don't have a commenting possibility
EK> so why should WWP have it?
The risk of sorting by popularity - whether it is
access stats or a "positive only" rating system, is
exactly that: pop culture. It is the bestsellers list
at Amazon and the top ten at iTunes and weeds out the
extraordinary artists that end up buried in the noise
of the popular ones.
I am personally inclined not to have neither comments
nor ratings, but I also see and understand the reasons
of those who do want them.
PS> we should have comments iff (if and only if) the
PS> number of contributors asking for comments
PS> outnumber enough the number of contributors
PS> asking to not have comments.
Some aspects of the WWP are mandated (such as topic,
timeframe, technology), others are optional (such as a
fullscreen, equipment information, description). We
should certainly seek consensus, though the choices
are at least three:
- no comments: status quo
- optional comments: author can decide whether they
want comments on their page
- mandated comments: all pages have comments
the one that seems most acceptable to me and most
respectful of the varied group that we are is
"optional comments".
UC > As for feedback from viewers - most of us include
UC > some link to our own sites, etc.
Indeed some already do, and I see other asking for
help with this, and other asking to standardize /
institutionalize this.
The Web 2.0 has brought not only social networks but
also a set of techniques to support them. I am
thinking of AJAX and cross site scripting that enable
the integration of such tools as GoogleMap on third
party website. Syndication.
I have written a snippet of code, that is still alpha
(does not yet work in Safari and is quite quirky). It
enables syndication of a WWP entry on *any* blog or
website out there. Any non-technical person can use it
or ignore it - it is optional.
In its very primitive form, to the author, it looks
like this:
<script>
var wwp_event="wwp1206";
var wwp_contrib="YourName";
</script>
<script src="http://server.hosting.the/script" />
And to the viewer of the page it integrates the
selected entry seamlessly in the page design (well,
currently width and height are fixed, but it is a
feature that is easy to implement).
This way, users that want to have discussion of their
entries can integrate them in any of the existing
blogs that invite comment. AFAIK there are blogs for
free out there on the net. Modern blogs offer so
called permalinks to a thread and everybody can put a
link to his permalinked discussion in the comments
field to his entry.
That is: syndication of WWP content to a third party
website.
If those providing bandwidth to the WWP are
comfortable with this sort of "hot linking" and if
there is a need for this, I can contribute the code.
Yuv
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