Local Search | Jennifer Lind

As far as blogs go, comments are key to having dynamic content. For the author, it gives you a chance to see what others think of your writing and helps you see another viewpoint. For the viewer, it allows you to express concern, agreement, or another argument to what you are reading. It’s a win-win for all!

So why haven’t new tools been developed to make blog commenting even more interactive? What about allowing viewers to comment directly within the blog post? For example, say I have an argument I want to discuss for one specific line within the author’s text. Currently, you need to start a new comment and this comment will be shown at the bottom of the page. Allowing comments within the blog post could pop up comments as a note when you hover over specific words predetermined by the commenter. I’m thinking something similar to Adobe Acrobat’s text editor feature, which will give future readers a “real-time” conversation between the author and the readers.

I did a quick search to see if there were currently any interesting commenting tools out there,and I came up with one called BackType.

For example, you can put together a list of the people whose comments you want to see, and then check out the blog post they commented on. Or you can search for comments by people, keywords, exact phrases and dates.

It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t know how often I would use it. I think people typically search by topic instead of by day or commenter, but maybe there are certain instances where this would be helpful.