PUBLIC MARKS from Spone with tag blog

An archive of the best articles from the now sadly defunct blog.pmarca.com

The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes. So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)

Asaph is a micro-blogging system, focusing on collecting links and images from other pages. It allows you to post content directly from any page you are on. Asaph is not a full blown blog and it does not aim to be one — it just does this one task, but it's pretty good at it.

The 10th arrondissement of Paris is what many French people would still call "populaire" - which means a "working class" and diverse area. Our street from the very first day was a fascination to me. Each day there were groups of young guys standing around. They didn't speak French and they seemed to be from somewhere in the Middle East.

Rue89 reproduit le « Manifeste Internet » dans lequel quinze blogueurs allemands répondent aux critiques formulées par les éditeurs de presse dans leur « Déclaration de Hambourg » sur l'insuffisante protection du droit d'auteur sur le Net.

Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

À moins que ce ne soit son audience. Mais il y en a qui font de tels efforts qu'ils méritent néanmoins qu'on leur présente nos compliments. Et je dois reconnaître que Frédéric Lefèbvre s'est surpassé avec cette interview dans 20 minutes. L'académie Busiris n'a pas été convoquée faute de propos juridiquement aberrant : ils sont simplement atterrants.

Pims Labs est le blog des développeurs de Pims. Pims est un projet de plate-forme applicative Web, Open Source, soutenu en grande partie par l’agence Periscope Creations. Pims est déjà bien avancé dans sa conception et sa réalisation, nous libérerons ses sources cette année 2009. En attendant, notre équipe de développeurs communique sur ce blog.

I go to a website and read an article. Man, that was really great. I’d like to comment and ask the author a question. I scroll down… 384 comments. Ugh. Screw this.

When it comes to following the ebb and flow of comments on blogs, it’s easy to get lost; they’re not laid out in the thread format we see in forums, but in a linear hoppity-skip way that makes a consistent flow of discussion almost impossible to maintain. One comment might not draw a response for a month, by which time fifty other comments may separate the initial post and its follow up. This is the issue I think I’ve dealt with.

Introducing Geode, an experimental add-on to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 ahead of the implementation of geolocation in a future product release. Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today, and users can tell us what they think of the experience it provides. It includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data.