Comment On Everything – January 2010 Ideas
The nineth idea for my 365 social ideas is another social web principle, that I would like to introduce: Allow your users to comment on everything, everywhere. And this goes double for the corporate stuff, that almost never is “commentable”.
A simple way of achieving this could be to implement the now quite classic Web 2.0 must-have Get Satisfaction, which encapsulates the essence of this idea in a more general way. You do not comment directly on what you look at, but you can see what other users think about the site/service/brand/personality, that you are viewing in an indirect way.
Another quite simple way is to make sure, that anything is easily linkable. Then people can take the discussion elsewhere, but via links clearly point out, what they are referring to. But that is also a question of URL structure etc, which is a completely different topic (and potential future idea to be explored here).
The hardest way to do it is what can be seen on many programming references, like in Google’s references, the PHP manual or Adobe’s LiveDocs for ActionScript 3.
Why?
User input is of the highest importance to any website no matter the purpose. Make sure that your users freely can discuss whatever the wish regarding your content and make sure to track what is being said and address bad comments in a swift, polite and professional manner.
What’s next?
Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.
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Category: January 2010 Ideas, Trends 3 comments »
January 13th, 2010 at 09:58
Isn’t that what Google Sidewiki does?
January 13th, 2010 at 12:46
That is another way of doing it. And there are many… I just want people to think about it and choose :)
There was also that other thing some years ago, where you could press comment on any paragraph in a text (and so other comments on the same, un-moderated). Can’t remember the name though, but it was actually pretty nifty…
January 13th, 2010 at 13:35
Kinda like post-its for webpages (which exists and can be shared)