- annotation
- A critical or explanatory note; a commentary.
Delighted about this idea, I’m not sure where the stimulus occurred, but I’ll lay the idea down and see where it goes.
The current method of commenting is quite simple, we look to the end of an article and see time-orderly comments and/or inline replies. This idea is not out of the box, but what I’ve seen from flickr and even in danbooru image sites are annotations on images, and my question is why have we yet to see annotations within posts, each as it’s own comment thread.
Commenting in this nature would allow physical focus on specific excerpts of a post, which would ultimately be more interesting in my opinion.
So what about it?
There’s a plugin which lets you do blockquotes on parts of the article you’re addressing in the comments. I’m not sure which one but I’ve seen it on various sites.
Personally, I’d rather read the article and then get the secondary opinion later. With text, I don’t want things popping up, flashing, or otherwise distracting me. I don’t read with my finger underlining each word, so it’s not natural for me to read with my pointer under each word, waiting for a popup. With images, it’s more natural. You see a face and you want to know who it is.
Ah, that may be a good start. I don’t plan on implementing but I think it would better organize the comment-forum effect, though threaded comments are supposed to address it.
Anyway, as for being a distraction, the benefit of javascript is the dynamic ability to turn these things on/off. So a way to avoid distraction could be having a button at the bottom which you must click after reading to see the comments.
Being on flickr myself, this is quite a good way… until you get too many comments, sometimes resulting in what my friends term the “note convo” — and that can get quite messy.
@Lehq, yes, these note convos are frequently seen in regular comment sections. Maybe these highlight areas could be called Discussion Focuses, which then partition the topics, rather than having comments full of mixed conversations.
Great idea. But … the implementation would be a bitch.