I just made my first HTML comment here, at the end of the Lorelei experiment, pointing to its continuation with Leone (the theme not the director). w00t w00t!
It’s not at all obvious but by default WordPress blogs are set up to allow HTML in comments. There’s no preview feature or WYSIWIG editor though so it’s a little nervewracking to post something with formatting in it … I think I’ve got the ability to edit comments so I can always clean things up if need be.
[This is by the way an excellent example of a technology-imposed power differentiation between the original poster and commenters. While it’s not inherent in the blog format, and some systems avoid it (ezBoard and Joomla/Community Builder for example, using bbcode instead of HTML), it exists to a fairly large extent in most implementations:  Sharepoint by default has HTML disabled in the comments and a huge differential in font size — and doesn’t have preview; Blogger allows just a subset of HTML and doesn’t allow editing after the comments are submitted; etc.  But I digress.]
Of course once I had posted the comment I discovered that it wasn’t strictly-speaking necessary; WordPress had auto-generated a trackback from my continuation post, and even managed to extract a very useful summary. Impressive. What I really want is a combination of the two, both the explicitness of “story continued here” and the quick summary to be able to read in place and see whether to follow the link … that should be equally easy to generate automagically.
Looking closely at this reveals another power differential: links in posts get these kinds of trackbacks generated, but links in comments don’t. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing [there are a lot more comments than posts, so autogenerating this for links in comments might overwhelm threads with these notifications — and the comment-spam problem would be magnified hugely] but there is an asymmetry.
Or as they say in the What Kind of Postmodernist Are you? quiz: “Foucault. It all starts with Foucault.”
jon | 08-Dec-07 at 11:51 am | Permalink
Actually now that I look more closely WordPress’ auto-generated mail calls these pingbacks, not trackbacks. wikipedia helpfully clarifies that pingbacks and trackbacks are two different implementations of linkbacks, “a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents”. It sounds like a Monty Python skit or something.
Just thought you’d want to know.
Vanita | 08-Dec-07 at 8:15 pm | Permalink
You were useless (I met with you several times at Microsoft) and it looks like you still are. I am glad to hear you are gone – it made no sense for Microsoft to pay you a hefty salary given the “work” you were doing. All this high level bullshit…
jon | 08-Dec-07 at 8:36 pm | Permalink
Thanks for sharing, Vanita. How do you see this as relating to the topic of the thread?
(Continued here)
Liminal states » Rant: I hate software | 23-Sep-08 at 9:38 am | Permalink
[…] Liminal states Jon’s blog, title subject to change « Reflections: what I learned during my summer vacation […]
jon | 18-Nov-08 at 10:21 am | Permalink
I just got bitten in an attempt to comment on Jen Nadeau’s Women in Tech: a Dying Breed on change.org‘s Women’s Rights blog.
The funny thing is, last month I was in a discussion on an email list where Ben Rattray of change.org had discussed their unusually low commenter ratio of 1/250 readers. One of my comments:
Yeah. What I said.
Given the subject of Jen’s post (which I discuss in more detail in the Gender, age, race, power, etc. thread), it’s worth highlighting the gender issues at play here. Recent work in Gender HCI by Laura Beckwith, Margaret Burnett, and others shows significant differences in behavior across genders related to confidence and self-efficacy. While I don’t know if anybody’s studied this with respect to blogging yet, it seems to me that it’s equally likely to apply — which would imply that lack of a preview button tends to deter women from participating even more than it affects men.
jon | 24-Jan-11 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
I linked to this thread from a comment in Life imitates art imitates life …