Tag: comments

Facebook Suspension: Day 11 [en]

It’s been 11 days since my Facebook account was suspended. Where are things at?

The appeal, predictably, didn’t yield any results. No response, no e-mail, no change, nothing. I have no other “official” appeal routes, as I cannot access the platform at all. So I wrote up my appeal in a blog post.

What you can do to help: share my story or my appeal, give visibility to my situation – including on Facebook where I have become inexistant. If you know people who might know people, please ask. It seems pretty clear that unless a case manages to gather the attention of the right people (including, it seems, through the media), not much will happen. Going public helps. A huge thanks to those of you who have already shared my posts or updates, reached out to your networks, etc. Facebook is where I had the most reach, and without it, I am struggling to raise awareness on my situation. The reach I have in normal times is, of course, abnormal. A working system should not depend on people having a platform or connections to work right and be fair.

False Positives

My old friend Kevin Marks pointed me to this extremely interesting article: Cost of False Positives (Kellan Elliott-McCrea). Two take-aways:

  • with scale, false positives in identifying abuse of a social site create a huge problem to deal with, even when the detection methods are “very good”; Kellan runs through some numbers, and it’s way beyond what I could have imagined (and the article was written nearly 15 years ago)
  • early adopters (like me!) are outliers in the data and are at higher risk of “looking funny” to abuse detection algorithms; indeed, we are not “normal users”; I share huge quantities of links; my account goes back nearly two decades so there are lots of publications to sift through and which might be flagged; I am at times extremely active in (human) ways which could seem “unhuman”: amount and type of content, speed, etc.

Automation

Just now, I was reading this article from Ars Technica: Social Media Probably Can’t Be Fixed. (It’s an open tab in my browser, not too sure how it go there.) It feels like it.

Even at my social “scale”, when I think about the main community I run (diabetic cats, 7k members), we run into scale issues where it becomes more and more difficult to treat everybody fairly and in a human way. And when I think of how to improve things from a management perspective (because volunteer ressources are limited, always will be) I find myself thinking in terms of automation, how to use AI to support the team doing content moderation or to improve the “member journey” in the community. Less personal, less human.

With automation, you get scale (and with scale you end up needing automation), but with that, you lose personal connection and at some point it comes crumbling down.

Life Without Facebook

How have I been coping with being un-facebooked? Well, beyond the shock and the hurt and the grief and the anger and the injustice of it all, and setting aside the extra “admin work” this is adding to my plate, being forced off Facebook has done two things for me:

  • regroup on my blog and other platforms, and in the process, get to experience different “connection spaces” than the main one I had on Facebook
  • imagine a life without/after Facebook: less connection maybe, a slower pace – I am getting to measure how “caught up” I get in the platform and how good it is at keeping me there.

Before we go all “silver linings”: this sucks. I didn’t need this. It has been extremely distressing and has had a negative impact on my health, in particular my recovery from post-concussion syndrome after my accident. I feel more disconnected and isolated, because I have lost my access to the people I was in touch with on a daily basis (some of them “online-only” friends, many of them not). Life on Facebook continues without me. I’m not being flooded with mails and messages of people asking me what’s going on or how I’m doing. It’s mainly silence.

Losing my content is also dreadful. I’ve spent some time this week-end going through my various archives from various platforms and tools over the years, organising them somewhat, checking they actually work, and exporting recent archives of the places I’m still at. My last proper facebook export is nearly 10 years old. I mentioned before, I think, that I tried to do an export in June, but gave up because it required me to manually download 52 files weighing 2Gb each, at a snail’s pace, and which made my network drop. The “export to Google Drive” didn’t work. So, my stuff on Facebook is a 104Gb export. Outliers in the data, anybody?

Why I’m Fighting

I made the choice to try and fight this, instead of sitting back and saying “oh well, that’s that”. I made the choice to fight because it is meaningful to me in different ways:

  • I care about my content locked up in the platform and would like to get it back.
  • I run a busy support group there, thankfully with a wonderful team who is holding the fort, despite being worn out by six months of my post-accident absence and a couple more years of me struggling to make time for the community amidst the other stuff going on in my life; I also have two decades worth of connections on the platform, which I do not want to just “cut off” like that – be it regarding the community or my network, real relationships are at stake, and if the future is away from Facebook, I want to be able to manage the transition and not be thrown off the plane in mid-air.
  • I am not alone: this is not just about me, but about a systemic, structural issue that has real impact on thousands of people’s lives; I’m lucky I don’t have a business that depends on my facebook presence anymore, but it could have been the case. Others aren’t that lucky. We are innocent casualties in the war against the bad actors of online social spaces, and deserve some kind of justice.
  • Meta, as a company, and Facebook, as a platform, want to play an important role in shaping our world. They want to be an indispensable tool for businesses, and also for normal people, without which they have no value for businesses. To me, it is unethical to have such ambition regarding their role in society and not provide even a semblance of support to those who make it possible – even if, as the saying goes, they “are the product”, because they do not pay. In my small modest way, taking a stand against enshittification.

This means that for the last 11 days, in addition to dealing with the impact of this suspension, I have been looking up articles, searching for solutions, writing blog posts, posting on a bunch of social media platforms I am normally dormant on, DMing friends and vague contacts, drawing up an action plan in my head, and putting my poor injured brain through the ringer to try to figure out what to do, where to start, what to prioritise, who to contact or speak to, in hopes of getting this suspension reversed. All that, knowing that chances are extremely slim and that it is probably useless.

Reconnecting Elsewhere

So, now that you’ve read all that, and without losing sight of it, what has been interesting? Clearly, reconnecting with my blog and feeling motivated to invest in ways of connecting to others and building community where I am not ceding control of everything to the Borg. (No, not that Borg – the new one.) That was already underway, but it has now been prioritised.

It has also made me aware of how facebook encourages a certain type of writing/publication and a certain type of discussion. Not so much in terms of content, but in terms of form. And there is value in doing it differently. I actually wrote some e-mails to people, since my suspension. I shared shorter snippets of stuff (passing thoughts, comments on links I found, ideas, daily anecdotes) because on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Twitter and Mastodon, for example, there are character limits. On my blog there are none, so I have had a chance to ramble along more. I have rediscovered people who left the Facebook boat already and with whom I had lost touch, because I poured almost all my sharing and connecting energy into Facebook.

I also published a couple of videos on Youtube, and plan to do more.

Shared Content

One thing I have become acutely aware of is that even when platforms allow you to export your content, one’s content in a social space is not just one’s publications. It is also comments, participation in the shared content that is a conversation, or a community. All the comments I ever made on Facebook have gone with my suspension. There are conversation threads with holes in them now. All the comments and conversations that took place because I published something, or because I commented and somebody answered – gone. Once people interact with your content, build upon it, it is not 100% yours anymore.

This has been an ongoing preoccupation of mine in shared social spaces. I remember, many many years ago, when blogs were young, a blogger I was actively following deleted their blog one day. And with it, all the comments I had taken the trouble to leave on their posts. “Leaving a comment” does not adequately reflect it, actually. It makes it feel like a small gesture done for the benefit of the other, but it’s not that. A comment can have as much value as a blog post. What makes it a comment is that it is a response, not that it is small or insignificant. It can be something valuable given to the community, and it should not be the right of another person to unilaterally destroy it.

I do not remember who the blogger was. It happened more than once.

Some years back, a few of my contacts on Facebook started a kind of automatic removal of their posts after a certain amount of time had gone by, taking my shares and comments with them. I stopped sharing and commenting on those posts.

I know, the lesson is: if you don’t want something you write to disappear, write it on your blog. But context matters.

Content and Community

This “it’s my content, I’m allowed to delete it” mindset is also an issue in Facebook groups. In the diabetic cat group, it thankfully didn’t happen very often, but when it did, it was infuriating. Somebody would post with an issue. People would expend time and energy in providing good answers and support. Then the person would delete their post, and all the answers with it. The whole point of a support group is that what is said to one person may also help another, who is reading. As a community, we also get to know our members and connect to them, and in that respect, their history in the group is important. Being able to refer back to that history is what allows a support community to function at a certain scale. Facebook does not allow group admins to prevent members from deleting posts and comments – something the platform I’m looking at for the future, Discourse, allows. It’s not all black and white of course, if you post something stupid and want to remove it an instant later, you can. But you can’t take down whole comment threads because you don’t like your post anymore. Participating in a community comes with a certain amount of responsibility towards other members of that community.

On the web side: Cool URIs don’t change. And also: cool content doesn’t disappear.

So, back to Facebook, what has been lost – for me, but also for others – is not just my posts and the pages of my cats, but it’s also a shared history, through discussions in comment threads and reposts on other people’s walls.

If we were connected on Facebook, and you would like to stay in touch, think about subscribing to this blog, and find me on the socials of your choice: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or LinkedIn. I’m still on the bird site but not very active there. I want to do more videos on Youtube, so it might be a good move to subscribe to my channel. I haven’t managed to recover my Tiktok account, so that’s that for the time being. I also have Instagram and Flickr (dormant, maybe it needs waking up), and I’ve created a little WhatsApp community – mainly francophone – where you can get announcements when I publish something here and a little chat-space with others and me, a kind of weird version of my Facebook wall off Facebook (ask me to join).

Of course, I always like it when people leave comments. I promise not to delete my blog.

Stories to Listen to, Moderating Blog Comments, Teaching Blogging [en]

[fr] Deux ou trois épisodes de podcasts à écouter. Quelques réflexions sur les commentaires de blog (spam ou non?) et la difficulté d'apprendre à bloguer.

Listen to Greetings from Coney Island. I swear you won’t be disappointed. Just don’t make the same mistake I did, and be a bit distracted early on, not realising there are two parallel stories, told by two women with (to me) very similar voices. I actually reached the end of the story before realising I had missed the whole point, so I listened to it all again. It was worth it.

vue cham

Another episode of Love+Radio reminded me of a Moth story I heard quite a long time ago now. It’s about a volunteer at a suicide prevention hotline. That story made me understand something about suicide (which I am lucky not to know from the inside): it’s not about wanting to die, it’s about wanting the pain to stop. Like many Moth stories, it’s beautifully told and very moving. Well worth the small moment of your life you will spend listening to it.

I know, this blog is turning into a podcast review. But not only. See.

One of the challenges I face as editor-in-chief of Open Ears is approving comments. Not so much because we publish controversial articles that have people biting each other’s heads off in the comments (not at all, actually), but more because

  1. spambots are getting better and better at sounding human
  2. some humans are sounding more and more like spambots.

About the latter: people like me have been saying for years that a great way to get your website or blog known is to comment on other blogs. But that’s not quite the whole story. Aligning fluffy or self-promotional comments on other people’s blogs might get your “nofollowed” links out there, but isn’t really going to do what matters, which is encouraging people to actually know you and read your stuff because they’re interested. Clicks and visits only really mean anything if they come from the heart.

So what does work? Well, actually, being a valued member of the communities you are part of. At the time, during the Golden Age of Blogging, leaving meaningful comments on blogs you read and linked to was a way of being that. It’s not about the links, it’s about the place you respectfully take or are given willingly. Add value. Be helpful. Try and make friends. That’s the spirit of “leaving comments”.

Which brings me to an important piece of blogging advice I came up with while trying to teach my latest batch of students the basics of blogging (it was, to put it kindly, a mixed success): blog about stuff that’s in your head. Write about what you know. If you have to google around to factcheck this or that, find a link, or look up a detail, that’s fine. But if you find yourself doing research and reading up to gather the material for your blog post (and the post is not about your research), chances are you’re “doing it wrong”.

Blogging is this weird thing which as at the same time so easy (for “natural bloggers”) but so hard to learn or teach. I think that is because it touches upon “being” more than “doing”. It’s about daring a certain degree of authenticity that we are not encouraged to wear in our school or professional lives. And it’s definitely not how we learn to write. In a way, teaching blogging is a bit like trying to teach people to dare to be themselves in public. This makes you think of Brené Brown and vulnerability, does it not? Exactly. And that is why, I think, blogging is a powerful tool to connect people.

Measuring a Blog's Success: Visitors and Comments Don't Cut It [en]

[fr] Un blog, c'est un investissement à long terme. Six mois, un an au moins sans se poser de questions, avant d'essayer de voir si "ça marche" ou pas. Et ne mesurez pas son succès aux visiteurs et aux commentaires. Plutôt, trouvez un moyen plus qualitatif de mesurer les bénéfices que vous en retirez, en vous basant sur la raison pour laquelle vous tenez ce blog.

Interestingly, a large part of my work right now seems to revolved around blogging. I’m happy about that. I’ve been blogging for over 10 years now, and went I became self-employed mid-2006 the first “title” I used was “blogging consultant”. Because back then, it was about blogs (and maybe wikis, and maybe social software, but not “social media”).

Anyway, I digress.

What I want to point out is that if you start a blog, or your company starts a blog, it’s important to have realistic expectations about the kind of benefits you’ll reap, and when, and how to measure them.

Even in 2011, too many people imagine that if you’re doing a good job with your blog, it will translate into thousands of visits per day and dozens of comments within a few weeks.

No way.

Those blogs with thousands of visits per day and dozens of comments are edge-cases, and have probably been at it for longer than you have.

Blogs and comments are actually not a good way of measuring the success of a blog. Honestly, if your blog has a few hundred readers a day and you get a comment now and again, you’re doing fine.

To measure the success of your blog, you need to think back to the reason you’re doing it. What do you want to get out of it? Chances are that “having as many people as possible visit it” is not the reason you’re doing it.

Maybe you want to change the perception people have of you. Maybe you want to showcase certain things you’re doing. Maybe you want to attract a certain type of person — reader, writer, or contributor. Maybe it’s the “marketing budget” for your business. Maybe you want to share a passion. Maybe you want an outlet to express yourself.

There are many reasons to want a blog. And most of them are perfectly valid (one that’s not, most of the time: make money with it).

But don’t go around measuring readers and comments to judge your success just because they’re convenient numbers.

Maybe what you need to do is create a scrapbook of all the things people spontaneously say about your blog, online or off. Maybe you need to make a list of events or situations where your blog was an ice-breaker or opened doors for you.

That seems to make way more sense than counting visits and comments. I mean, if those are so important to make somebody happy, they can be gamed.

Blogging takes time. It takes time because it takes time to think, write, link, tag, categorize, illustrate, title, proof, and publish. It takes time to be creative, and if your ambition for your blog is to be more than a collection of breaking news, hot topics and catchy headlines, blogging is a creative job.

But blogging also takes time because it’s a long-term strategy. When blogging started being hot, there were these numbers flying around, telling us that the average blog on the web was 3 months old and had 3 articles (or something like that). People started blogging, and abandoned their blogs very quickly.

When starting a blog, I wouldn’t worry about if it’s working or not before at least six months or a year. People are in such a hurry nowadays. All this hype about real-time, the internet being a place of unprecedented speed, the acceleration of innovation, not to say the “overnight successes” we keep hearing about but which languished in obscurity for ages before coming to the light. And even if there are real “overnight sensations”, they are, as I said above, edge cases.

And your blog will not be an edge case.

Your blog can work fine and do its job, but it will not be an edge case.

Unless your blog is your product — and in this case you’re clearly in the media business, and not using your blog as a communication tool — it is not to be looked at as a service or product people are going to use everyday and flock to. Instead, it’s a collection of valuable, long-lasting, well-indexed information. It’s the expression of something. It colours who you are.

And that takes time — not just the time of labour, but the days and months flying by in the calendar, so that value can accumulate, and become valuable.

Let me sum up this long rambling post in a few points:

  • blogging is a long-term strategy: it will take many months or even years for you to see what benefits it’s actually bringing you
  • don’t obsess on visitors and comments; instead, focus on what is said about your blog, and the opportunities it brings, in terms of contacts, open doors, favorable dispositions (qualitative measurement rather than quantitative)

Catching up With Backtype [en]

[fr] BackType: pour voir les commentaires que je fais dans la blogosphère, l'impact "social" de mon blog, les derniers tweets qui le référencent, et un plugin WordPress (TweetCount) qui va remplacer TechMeme pour moi, simplement parce qu'il liste effectivement les tweets référençant l'article en question, ce que TechMeme ne fait pas.

Image representing BackType as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

A few weeks ago I read that BackType was going to discontinue the BackType Connect plugin that I had used some time back here on CTTS, which prompted me to (a bit hastily, I’ll admit) make a comment about how you’re really better off not relying on a third party for hosting your comments (which is not what BackType does, my bad).

The BackType Connect plugin took offsite reactions to your blog posts (tweets, for example) and published them as comments. I have to say I was never really really happy with the plugin: installing it made me realize that most mentions of my posts on Twitter were retweets (or spambots) and that I didn’t want to mix that kind of “reaction” with my comments. At one point the plugin really stopped working (or gave me some kind of grief) and I dropped it.

I actually liked BackType a lot when they started out, and I owe them big time for saving hundreds of my blog comments when I dropped my database early 2009. Even though I wasn’t using their plugin, I was unhappy about the announcement — and even more unhappy when I discovered that my user page had disappeared (yes, the one displaying all the comments I’d made on other blogs and this one, which replaced what I’d used coComment for).

BackType, however, did something I liked a lot, and wished TweetMeme had done: allow me to see all the latest tweets linking to Climb to the Stars. This prompted me to take a closer look at what BackType was actually still doing, and report my findings of interest back to you, dear readers.

  1. Good surprise: BackType actually does still allow me to track comments I make all over the blogosphere — but it uses my URL rather than my user account to identify me.
  2. Already mentioned: tweets linking to my blog. Including old ones.
  3. The social impact of any URL: tweets, comments and friendfeed mentions over time, complete with mugshots of “top influencers“.
  4. TweetCount plugin, which is probably going to replace the TweetMeme plugin I was using until now,  because BackType actually lists tweets linking back to a post (compare with the TweetMeme page for the same post). I’ve always found TweetMeme a bit too close to Digg and TechMeme (you know I’m no fan of the race for popularity or breaking news). TweetCount counts a few less tweets than TechMeme, and I suspect its results are cleaner.
  5. If you like displaying tweets mentioning your posts on your blog, you should also check out the BackTweets plugin.

Does BackType do anything else that seems precious to you?

Conversation fragmentation is still an issue in today’s blogosphere, but tools like BackType (and even the Facebook Like button!) are helping is stitch the different pieces together.

Twitter Killed My Blog and Comments Killed Our Links [en]

I hope the provocative title grabbed your attention.

Let me say it straight out: my blog is not dead, neither are our links.

But I still have a point.

Twitter is IRC on steroids, for those of you who have already experienced the irresistable draw of a chatroom full of smart witty people, 24/7. Twitter is my very own IRC channel, where I do not have to hear those I do not care about. It’s less geeky than IRC, which means that many of my “online spaces” collide there.

It’s intoxicating. I love it. I can spend all day there.

But that’s not why I would provocatively say that it has killed my blog. Twitter is a content-sharing space, not just a super IRC channel. Found an interesting link? Five years ago, it would have morphed into a blog post, because that was pretty much the only way to share it. Nowadays, dump it in Twitter. Arrived safely at destination? Again, 5 years ago, blog post. Now, tweet.

New tools have an impact on how we use old tools. Sometimes we abandon them altogether, but most of the time, we just redefine the way we use them. This is what I was trying to explore in the first panel I ever moderated, at BlogTalk 2008 (crappy video).

So, no, Twitter did not kill my blog, but take a group of bloggers and give them Twitter accounts, and the temperature of the blogosphere changes. All the high-speed stuff moves to Twitter.

If you just look at the present, it’s no big deal. People are still connecting. That’s what all this social media/software is about, right? Connecting people. Online. But the problem with us spending all our time swimming in the real-time stream is that it’s just that, a real-time stream. Not much is left of it once it has passed.

Take this short piece about translation I wrote nearly 10 years ago. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s still there, as readable as it was when I wrote it. Had this taken place on Twitter, nothing much would be left of it. Gone with the wind, if I dare say.

Many many years ago when I first started blogging (can you tell I’m on a nostalgic streak?), blogs did not have comments. Hell, I barely even had permalinks when I started. Permalinks were the key, though: they allowed bloggers to link to each other’s writings.

And we did. Conversations would bounce from blog to blog. They weren’t chatty like on IM, IRC, or Twitter. They were blog-post-speed conversations. We would have to think (a little) before we wrote.

Even though comments are a wonderful invention and I would never want to take them back, they did ruin this, in a way. People started leaving comments all over the place and didn’t come back to their blogs to write about the conversations they were participating in. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited about coComment when it came out, or services like BackType (which also seems to have backed out of tracking comments one makes) or Disqus. (Aside: see, I’d love somebody to hire me to do some research and write a memo on the current state of the comment-tracking-sphere and all the players involved. I could totally see myself doing that.)

With comments came less of an incentive to link to each other on our blogs. With Twitter (and Facebook), less of an incentive to share certain things on our blogs, and also, less of an incentive to comment, as it became much easier to just “tweet a quickie” to the post author (therefore making our activity visible to all our followers). And with the death of Technorati tags (I’ll call it that), we bloggers are now connecting to each other on other social networks than the blogosphere.

I think it’s time to actively reclaim the blogosphere as our own, after leaving it for too long at the hands of marketing and PR.

Bloggers, it’s time to wake up! Write blog posts. Link to your fellow bloggers. Leave comments on their posts, or better, respond to them on your blogs.

We don’t have to abandon Twitter and Facebook — just remember that first and foremost, we are writers, and that “conversation” (though ’tis a wonderful thing) is not writing.

Comment Ownership, Reloaded [en]

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about comment ownership and coComment (it was initially published on their blog, and I moved it over here at some point). I don’t use coComment anymore, but a few of the points I made then are still valid.

Comment ownership is a complex problem. The commenter writes the comment, but the blog owner hosts it. So of course, the blog owner has the right to decide what he agrees to host or not. But the person who wrote the comment might also want to claim some right to his writing once it’s published.

And also the following:

There are times when one could say the “blog owner rights” and “comment writer’s rights” come into conflict. How do you manage such situations?

Here’s an example. Somebody e-mails me, out of the blue, to ask me to remove a comment of his on a post published ages ago (ironically, it’s the post published just before the one I’m quoting above!)

I went to look at the comment in question, and frankly, it’s completely innocuous. So I googled that person’s name and realised that my post appears somewhere in the middle of the first page of results. This gives me a guess as to why the person is contacting me to remove the comment.

And really, it seems pretty petty to me. And removing that comment bugs me, because I responded to it, and the person responded back, so what the person is in fact asking me to do is to remove (or dismember) a conversation in the comments of my blog, which has been sitting there for nearly four years. All that because they’re not happy that CTTS makes their comment appear somewhere on the first page of results for a Google search on their name.

Which brings me back to comment ownership. Saying the comment belongs to the commentator is simplistic. C’mon, if everybody who left a comment on CTTS these last 10 years started e-mailing me to remove them because they “taint” their ego-googling, I simply wouldn’t have time to deal with all the requests.

But saying the comment belongs to the blog owner is simplistic too.

I think we’re in a situation which mirrors (in complexity) that of photography ownership between model and photographer. With the added perk that in the case of blog comments, as soon as it is published, the comment becomes part of a conversation that the community is taking part in. Allowing people to remove published comments on a whim breaks that. (Just like bloggers don’t usually delete posts unless there is a very strong reason to do so — when published, it becomes part of something bigger than itself, that we do not own.)

So, for this situation, I guess the obvious response is to change the full name to initials or a nickname, and leave the comment.

But I see this with discussion lists, too. The other day, a pretty annoyed woman was complaining that somebody had called her out of the blue about coworking, when she was not at all interested in sharing an office space. Well, she had written a message or two on a local coworking discussion list, with all her contact details in signature.

What do you expect? And what happened to taking a deep breath and deciding “OK, I’ll do things differently in the future” when you realise you behaved a little cluelessly in the past?

I think all this concern about e-reputation is going to start becoming a real pain in the neck. Get over it, people. Open a blog and make sure you own your online identity, and you can stop worrying about the comments you made four years ago.

Conversation in Comments vs. Conversation in Twitter [en]

[fr] Twitter n'est pas en train de tuer les conversations dans les commentaires des blogs. Le bavardage s'est déplacé dans Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook -- mais quand certains disent que la conversation y est meilleure, ils ignorent le fait qu'il y a plusieurs sortes de conversation.

Hey, another “vs.” post! It must be because I get tired quickly of people comparing apples and oranges, and saying that we’re not going to eat apples anymore because we now have oranges.

A good year and a half ago there was some talk around the fact that the conversation had moved out of blogs and into Twitter and Friendfeed.

That’s not quite true: some of the conversation has moved from blog comments into the stream. The chatter, mainly.

Just like, when comments first started appearing on weblogs (remember those times, folks?) — well, some of the conversation that was happening from blog post to blog post moved into the comments.

But there was already conversation. Blogs without comments are still blogs.

So, what has happened? The more immediate, chat-like conversation has indeed moved out of blog comments and into Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed-like services. The short one-liners. But the real value-adding comments, those that make the conversation meaningful, those that actually discuss in depth what the blogger wrote, or contribute something beyond “great post” or “load of horseshit” — those are still there in our blog comments.

I see a parallel here with the distinction I make between live-tweeting and live-blogging. I’m not anti-Twitter or anti-anything: I love Twitter, and use it for more than my fair share of chatter. But the chatter of today most often has lost its appeal tomorrow, and will not take the place of deep conversation that one can catch up with even once it has gone cold.

This, by the way, is also the root of my dislike of threaded conversations on blogs.

WordPress on my iPhone [en]

Wow, just checking out the new WordPress iPhone app. It now allows comment moderation management, post and page editing, as well as saving non-local drafts. I’m going to start using it regularly… Though maybe not for writing my usual unending posts for CTTS!

Disqus Plugin Aftermath: Removing Duplicate Comments [en]

[fr] Comment se débarrasser de 5000 commentaires à double dans sa base de données WordPress!

Now that Disqus integrates Friendfeed comments, I could be tempted to give it another try, if I hadn’t spent an hour yesterday cleaning up my database because of an earlier attempt to use Disqus on this blog. After the story, how I did it — in case you’re in the same mess and could use the help.

Back in August, I installed the Disqus plugin for WordPress. Things started off not too badly, though I was a bit concerned that the plugin seemed to have duplicated all the comments in my database. It didn’t seem to show up on the blog though, so I didn’t worry too much.

After a few months, I was a bit frustrated with Disqus and the plugin (which was clearly an older version than the Disqus plugin available now). Moderating comments through the WordPress interface seemed to work erraticly, and some spam just wouldn’t accept to stay in the spambox. I never really tried to identify the exact problems too closely, I have to admit, but things were not really working how I expected them to.

Then a few (unrelated) people told me they had completely failed to comment on my blog with the new system. At some point, I got fed up and uninstalled it. Unfortunately, the duplicate comments which had been hidden from view remained there after uninstalling the plugin, so all the old comments appeared on the blog twice. I let the problem sit for a long time before attempting to fix it — wild hope there might be a ready-made script out there I could just run& in vain.

Here’s how I tackled the problem this week-end and ended up removing the duplicate comments without too much trouble, through PhpMyAdmin (PMA for short).

  • In PMA, I made sure that duplication seemed constant — it was
  • I discovered that the duplicate comments had “DISQUS” in the user-agent field
  • I dug around until I identified the last duplicate comment (when I installed the Disqus plugin, actually; I sorted the database comments table by comment date to do that)
  • I did a search, selecting comments which were younger than the last duplicate comment date AND had “DISQUS” in the user-agent field (the date bit is important, because comments posted while the plugin were active have “DISQUS” in the user-agent field but are not duplicates)
  • Then, I deleted everything that came up in the search — about 5000 comments (it helps to tell PMA to display 3000 lines per page when doing that :-))

Hope this can help somebody, and remember: always back up your database first!

Tumblr to Capture Comments? [en]

[fr] J'aimerais un système permettant de publier directement sur mon Tumblr les commentaires que je laisse sur d'autres blogs, sans passer par coComment.

The other evening, I was explaining that I still used coComment to capture the comments I made on other blogs. As always, people try to suggest alternatives: co.mments or disqus, for example. I appreciate the suggestions, but they show me that I haven’t managed to make myself clear.

CoComment does two main things:

  • track conversations you participate in (or want to keep an eye on) so that you are alerted when a new comment is added to the thread
  • capture the comments you make on other blogs so that you can collect them somewhere or republish them.

I use mainly the second feature. I’m not that interested in tracking all the conversations I take part in. Every now and again I am, and co.mments does indeed do the job, in an ad hoc way. Disqus is quite exciting and also allows centralization of the comments I make with the system (if I got it right), but it has the great disadvantage of still being too “blogger-centric” instead of “commenter-centric”: sure, I can install disqus on my blog (as a blogger), but it isn’t going to help me capture or track all my comments until all the blogs I visit have done the same.

So, like at the end of a messy break-up where you’re still sleeping with your ex, I’m still using coComment for the following:

  • capture the comments I make all over the place and republish them in my Tumblr.

That’s it. One thing coComment does pretty well, despite all the criticism I can make to the service, is capture comments I leave in a variety of comment forms (from WordPress to FriendFeed and Typepad and Blogger and even home-made in some cases) and spit them out in an RSS feed.

Yesterday, an idea dawned on me: what I really want is for my comments to be published in my Tumblr. Maybe we can come up with a way to do that directly?

I use Tumblr loads, and love it. The main thing I actively use it for (I’ve embedded a few RSS feeds in it) is for quoting interesting passages off blog/articles that I read. It’s very easy:

3 Steps to Share a Quote on Tumblr

  1. highlight some text on a page
  2. click on the Tumblr bookmarklet
  3. Tumblr automagically recognizes it as a quote, and pops up a window which you use to publish it.

The result of all this is that I have a Tumblr which is full of quotes, comments (thankfully coComment seem to have removed the nasty ads from the RSS feed I complained about), and other things (videos and screenshots, for example).

I’ve been thinking a lot (but not writing, I know) about how these new tools in my landscape, which weren’t there 8 years ago (in a few days!) when I started blogging, are modifying my publishing and interaction habits. The panel I moderated at BlogTalk in Cork was about that, actually, but I think we only brushed the surface.

So, back to the point for this post: I’d like a hack for my Tumblr bookmarklet — or maybe a separate bookmarklet (by Tumblr or a third party) which will publish the comment I’m submitting to my tumblelog. It would work a bit like the coComment bookmarklet: click it to activate it at some point before hitting submit — and it does its magic when you submit the comment.

If you like the idea, head over the Get Satisfaction and add your 2 cents.