Whaddya think - comments as wiki pages?
Dan sent me the following in an e-mail and I think he might be onto something:
...what if the comments where organized as a wiki page themselves (meaning a single wiki page for all comments to an article)? This way, the readers could work together to construct a "follow-up" to the article in an organized, collaborative manner. Maybe the problem with comments is the fact that they are linear (even if threaded) and go on without end. A wiki would allow some structure to be established in the comments. The best part would be that comments could then have the chance to evolve into core wiki pages overtime, even though they begin only as a collection of comments, links and ideas...wait, isn't that what a wiki is anyway?
It sure sounds good. From an implementation perspective, this might be easy to do in Roller with a comment type that uses an <iframe> that points to a JSPWiki installation. A simpler solution might be that users are allowed to edit their own comments. In Roller, we could set a cookie after the user added the comments - allowing them to see an edit/delete link when they return. Whaddya think? Is there a better way for comments to compliment blogs?
While we're talking about comments for blogs - I remember seeing a cool comment-alert system a while back. I can't seem to find it now. If you're spotted a cool alert system you'd like to see in Roller, let me know!