The more I think about what is next for #28daysofwriting the more I think it will be about commenting on blogs. Tonight I enjoyed the rare pleasure of replying to some on my own blog post from yesterday, “Micro Engagement is Killing our Edublogging Community“. Here are the few I managed in my 28 minutes tonight, take a look at the comment thread on the post for the full discussion:
I would take 20 comments instead of 100 RTs anyday. I know which one I gain most value from in terms of adding to the conversation and building on ideas.
I do hope we see the return of the long form – we need to invest in it and tend to it, we need this part of our edu culture to grow back. Whether commenting will do the same, who knows. The more I think about it the more I want to run a 28 days of writing alongside one supporting commenting. I want to see people doing that old thing of “I just commented on…” type social share.
John you pinged me on Twitter with that tool – Known http://known.johnj.info/2015/t…
Looks really interesting and I hope I can discover better ways to draw the conversations together from across the web. Any other ideas would be welcomed.
I have similar posts @disqus_2IzmJDVjOB around this blog over the years. The content is just consumed. I suppose for me I am not surprised when it is posts that are not needing discussion – when you genuinely invite ideas and see nothing you realise it is fading from our digital space.
I hope we can do that Stephanie, I think it would be a good follow up too – commenting for a month. Whilst a new bunch go through the writing month too – what do you think of that? So you have a crew doing the March writing days and a crew signed up to a month of commenting everyday.
Thanks Monika I think a focus on discussion and commenting is a good next step – in many ways it is much harder than just writing your own content. Engaging in meaningful ways though comments takes a different skill, we have to assimilate the original content and share our challenges and questions.
In reply to Christine McIntosh
I think there is lots of room for better commenting tools to be developed. Just had a search through some blog plugins for WordPress and there is not that much. Disqus is in fact a pretty solid tool compared to what else is there. Sorry you lost a comment, always painful, I have made it a habit now whenever I am commenting to copy anything I have written before hitting submit. Saved me many times.
In reply to Andrew Giddings
Thanks Andrew – yeah that thing about RSS readers has been something I have long been dissatisfied about. The experience of reading is nice, say in Feedly, but having to move out of that to comment always feels clunky. I would love to see that solved in some way.
I appreciate that conversations about the things we publish may occur elsewhere, but unless that dialogue or the ideas developed is fed back to the blog author in some way it goes unnoticed. For example if a long discussion occurs on Twitter or in a Fb group without the author they cannot learn as well. Always good to loop people back into discussion so that they can continue to learn too.
(Thanks to Dave for commenting just as I was posting – I will get to your comment too!)