Earth-missing asteroid 

Yes, we have comments 

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I've often wondered why your blog has comments arranged this way. It seems to me to give the impression that you are hiding the comments. I assume that isn't your intent, but I'm just telling you how I react to it.

You can't tell whether there are any comments unless you open the Discuss link. And if you happen to be looking at any day other than the current day, it seems that you have to first open the day in question, then open the Discuss link. As a result, I find I only go looking for comments here if I'm really, really curious about whether anyone has responded to something you wrote. On many other blogs, the fact that there are comments on a post is immediately evident while you are reading the post, and if the comments aren't displayed by default, you usually can get to them in one click. I find that much more to my liking.

Arrange your blog in whatever way you like -- I'm not trying to tell you how to run it. I'm just writing to let you know how it feels to me, in case you never realized it can give that impression.

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How do you deal with big topics like this? You seem to be very, very good and distilling things into a coherent, elegant document in the end.

--Mike--

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I've known for a long time about the impression this system gives, and I've long wished it were different. I have no doubt that the number of comments here would be much higher if the blog had a conventional commenting system. But when this blogware was designed, "conventional" didn't exist yet.

Meanwhile, as I understand it, I have no choice in the matter unless I move doc-weblogs.com to another server (or service) and migrate 7.5 years of postings to Wordpress. There is scriptware for doing this, and I've thought about it often. But it's hugely complicated and right now I'd rather see if Dave can get some forward motion in development around Manila and Radio Userland.

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I'm not sure something didn't change with your homepage though. Wasn't there a Discuss link at the bottom of EVERY day's list on the home page?

Now it's current day only on the home page and you have to click the link for the day you want to comment on to see the discuss link for that day.

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It has to do with relationship. RM rather than VRM. Or maybe just R, with help from protocols we don't have. Technical ones that support social ones.

We're going to need to develop some stuff, in some niches — boil some lagoons before we heat up the ocean — before people see that yes, the world is not only round instead of flat, but that this has great advantages for navigation and shipping.

Something like that.

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I imagine a scenario like this: read a blog post rate it data gets formatted, signed, etc... then uploaded to a public database

The basic problem as I see it is to figure out how to lock down the object being spoken about (perhaps an escrow/cache/md5 server?) so that everyone knows they are speaking on the same subject, without modification. This should generate a unique ID that could then be used to find matches of other metadata about the same object.

Once you can make assertions about an object, you can sign them, and share them. The next big leap is to then rate other people's ratings.

This then (finally) allows one to flag someone as a spammer, or rude, or funny, or insightful, or as someone who's probably had their identity stolen. This information could then be used to immediately update relevant records... kind of like key revocation - Added 11:03AM

The computation required to traverse all the trees in a database (or web thereof) will make it slow... but far richer than that of our Text Box Overlord

Hoping that all makes sense, and contributes something useful, --Mike--

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If you want to read all the comments at once, suggest you tell people to read them as topic. Once you get to the comments page/list, go back up to the top and click the topic link (which, in your case, is the day of week, date, year format)

Then you can read everyone's comments in one single web page. Scrolling: good. clicking link to read comment and then clicking back, clicking new link to read next comment and then clicking back, clicking new link to read the next comment and then clicking back: bad. I think this is a configurable option. But I don't recall offhand.

Manila... it brings back memories. I walked over the bed of coals to migrate my site to WordPress.

To my knowledge, things that go into limbo land during the migration are topics that are started by members. (if someone clicks discuss and then posts new topic, etc.) Because the author of the site is you, and that discussion post is not by you.

If it's a discussion post that is in response to your topics, well, okay then. The discussion post migrates.

Somewhen in my Manila career, I went from doing Flip Home Page (for new day turnover) to organizing the site by news items, which allow for briefer posts and categorizing them, as well. Comments to them migrate, too.

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