June 2009 Archives

Just testing out Typepad Connect. Typepad Connect is Six Apart's version of Intense Debate or Disqus or any of the commenting services that serve to enable the "horizontal contributions" that Cole has written about.

Just like I have done previously with Intense Debate, I have disabled the built in comments for this entry and added comments powered by typepad connect. You can also check out my typepad connect profile page.

I'm just curious to get some sense of what this service has to offer. Please post a comment below and let me know what you think.

We had the first meetings this summer with TLT Faculty Fellow, Carla Zembal-Saul. Part of Carla's interest is related to the social and interactive elements of learning portfolios. We talked a lot about the "horizontal contributions" hashed out in Cole's post and vaguely eluded to in my previous post. We spent some time looking at other comment engines.

As an experiment, I have turned off the built-in comments for this post, and turned on comments powered by intensedebate.com.

Some features of intense debate:

• post video comments (try it out, it's very easy)
• view your or another's intense debate profile to see comments you have left across the web
• comment voting
• easily embed youtube video
• easily embed polls
• threaded comments
• commenter profiles that include info such as last tweet, and links to other social sites.
• login with openid
• login with facebook connect

So, go ahead and comment below. Post some video comments. Vote some comments up and down. It's fun and easy!

It is raining. I am writing this from inside my car, to be posted on the web later. Here is something I am thinking about now.

Blog comments: Do we need a standard for some sort of blog entry object, where comments, and comment submission form can travel and be included in the recontextualization that happens with blog entries via RSS. For example, if I am running some sort of social hub for a class, and students' blog posts are flowing in to this space, wouldn't it be nice if the comments left on an entry at the aggregated space are in sync with the comments on the source blog. What if a blog provided a comment engine that acted in the more flexible manner of comment engines like disqus or facebook connect . The comments functionality could be embedded with the same post in any context. What if the the entry body that is included in the syndication feed also included the comments and the form? is that all we need to do?