By their own words shall they be known. Sounds like a reasonable idea, right? Aggregate all the comments someone has made on your weblog and display them prominently. Their every comment. Preserved. For eternity. In all its glorious intelligence and grace. For instance, every comment that Geodog has made on BurningBird's weblog. Stavrosthewonderchicken thinks it is cool and likes it.
Me, I'm not so sure. I can see the appeal of the old credo, "you own your words", and I tend to sign at least my pen name to comments. But I think of comments as ephemeral, and strongly contextual. Plus, as Gibbon might say, some things are meant to remain veiled in the decent obscurity of a obscure format. The last thing I want when someone puts my name in Google is to have the first thing come up be some stupid late night comment I put on a popular (dare I say A-list?) weblog. So will this cut down on stupid late night comments? Or just increase the number of anonymous cowards?
Thanks to Stavros... for the tip, and Burningbird for the idea and for implementing it. It'll be interesting to watch what happens.
Posted by Geodog at February 19, 2003 01:26 AM | TrackBackMy apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.
What's to prevent somebody else from writing a whole mess of Geodog entries? Or any other name for that matter?
There is no logon form, no validation that the name you type is YOU (nor should there be). Aside from the fact that comments out of context seem silly -- because it still might be nice to see everything somebody has contributed to the conversation -- there's too much opportunity for mistaken identity.
Posted by: RKB on February 19, 2003 09:41 AMIn many ways, this is no different than the Usenet newsgroups of old (which are still alive and going strong). People figured that stuff might get archived or might not, but would mostly just disappear off servers never to be seen again.
But along comes the Deja archive (now owned by Google, and I guess less complete than it used to be), and all those flamewars and hot-headed remarks people have made have come back to life. And similarly, there is no authentication as to who is posting.
Posted by: Gene (no, really) on February 19, 2003 01:14 PMOf course, arguing with myself again, something like this would allow you to notice comments you don't remember making. And then you could always ask Burningird to check the IP address of the comments that were sent, and banish them forever.
I think the better point here is the contextual nature of comments, that they don't carry nearly as much weight out of context.
Posted by: RKB on February 19, 2003 04:20 PMYeah, thinking about it some more, I'm not so worried about one of my many stupid comments popping up in Google - after all I write enough self revealing things here that are presumably being archived somewhere, in my FBI file if nowhere else.
I think that Burningbird's new feature just gives the comments too much weight, and aggregating them without the context doesn't make a lot of sense.
The possibilities for mischief inherent in the lack of authentication are huge, and grow every minute the more you think about it. Comment identity forgery and email forgery could easily be used to ruin someone's life. I don't even want to enumerate all the examples that come to mind -- you guys would wonder about my character. IP address tracking helps up to a point, but can easily be avoided by somebody thinking about what they are doing.
Whoever comes up with a practical solution for the digital authentication problem is going to make a lot of money, or have a lot of fun.
Posted by: The person formerly known as Geodog on February 19, 2003 08:14 PMNo cause is so right that one cannot find a fool following it.
Posted by: Tritter Michael on January 10, 2004 01:27 AM