Bring Blog Commentary Into The Mix

I too would love to see more robust blogging capabilities. A beefed up comments section would be fantastic. Also, the ability to show most popular posts would be useful.

You guys bring up some very good points.  We are wrestling with the best way to implement these ideas while still keeping a distinction between a Group Blog and a Discussion Topic which are currently two separate features within a Groupsite.

I would be interested in hearing what distinction you make between the two.

Thanks,

Shaun

It's a great question Shaun, and one that comes up frequently when I'm doing my training sessions on how to use the groupsite features. The distinction I make is that the blog is the place where you publish news and information that is relevant to your audience. A blog post is like a magazine article with an added bonus feature that allows readers to actually make comments if they choose. The other important distinction is that blog posts are meant to be shared and can easily be syndicated out to social media outposts like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. A blog post may or may not turn into a discussion in the comments section.

In contrast, the discussion forums are where conversations happen and questions are posted. If your intention is to start a conversation or ask a question, you're better off using the discussion forums. If you want to share news or information, and maybe turn that content into a discussion, use the blog. If one of your blog posts ends up generating a ton of comments, it may be worth turning it into a discussion topic in the forums. The discussion forums, unlike the blog comments, offer a more robust way to participate in and track a discussion thread, including the ability to add HTML.

There will be times when it's not clear which would be the better tool to use. But I think this is a good place to start.

Thanks, guys, for participating in this conversation.

I think we're using the words 'blog' and 'discussion.' I just realized a third word to add to the mix is 'article.' Why? Because until becoming active in several Groupsite communities, I've rarely participated in forum discussions. And because I realized as I wrote what follows, I'd been mixing discussions up with articles. Don't ask me why. And it doesn't matter, really.

So here are my thoughts about blogs:

Traditionally, I think of a blog post as more informal than an article in tone, style, and they're often shorter. My blogs are more personal, written from my personal perspective, and they can be less polished than articles. In blog posts, I share opinions and beliefs as well as information, and ask questions of my readers. I'm going for interaction and readers can interact - blogs often come with places to comment. Through interaction between blogger and those who comment, comments create a sense of connectedness, of belonging, of being a member of a tribe, an online community, a virtual village.

Discussions, by the very word, implies interaction. Web 2.0, in general, and Groupsite, specifically, are platforms for asynchronous interaction.

Yet for some reason, I've often thought of the Discussions as more like special articles that allow for comments and interaction. I think of articles as writing I might include in my e-zine or submit to article banks for others to include in their e-newsletters, websites, etc. They're longer, more polished, more informative, less conversational as they're published and don't include a way for people to comment or interact.

I'm a members of a Collaborative Credibility Cluster. We're a group of 8 professionals, each of whom is an expert in our field. We've circled our wagons around the themes of Web 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Community and Business, and Business and the Internet, and we're using Groupsite as our online platform.

Just yesterday we were talking about this very subject: what's the difference between a Forum Discussion and related Replies and a blog post and and related Comments. The guidelines we chose to adopt

So, the lines separating blog posts, forum discussions and articles may be blurred. I think the bottom line may be that if you were to ask 100 people, you'd get many answers... maybe not 100 different answers... certainly more than a few.

So why not create the Groupsite infrastructure that allows for, promotes, and facilitates the juiciest interactions possible in the most convenient, intuitive ways possible.

To me that means you can use HTML in either place. And the area for writing blog comments is easier to use.

Your thoughts?

Bonnie - Thanks for your thoughts.  Help me understand why you think their is a need and use case for a full html editor like this text editor in the comments section of a blog.

Thanks.

HTML would let me or anyone include links in a comment. That way I can share additional information or resources in a comment. If I've got another post or article or website or something people are more likely to go if they can click.

That's the big reason.

Understood. Do most blog comment areas on the web allow this?

I know some do as I've done it. I'll take better notice and do some experimenting and keep you posted, if you'd like.

In the mean time, what's the status of making the comment text box larger?

Thanks in advance and thanks now for all you've done!

Shaun, HTML is a fairly standard practice.  However, it needs to be tightly reined in, really a subset of HTML so that potentially malicious code can't be inserted into the box (such as javascript or flash tags).  If link/image/formatting tags are allowed, it would be very useful.

Regarding the division of discussion from blog comment, I agree with what's been said above.  A discussion thread is more informal and based on a short topic that invites debate or a back and forth conversation.  A blog post is more like a formal article which stands on its own, and though response posts are encouraged, it is less of a back and forth conversation.

However, blog responses are still vital.  The ability to see your trackbacks is crucial to a successful blog, as well as the fact that many times when an opinion is voiced in a blog post, it's the responses that carry some of the best data.  For example, I made a recent software purchase based on a blog post where the original poster listed several good options, but it was the nearly unanimous responses to the blog pointing to an unmentioned solution that sold the day.

Thanks for listening!

Shaun, here's a site that allows for html ~ http://ow.ly/Pl24 ~ it's nice for people who do want to display their email address among other reasons mentioned above.