2007/09/19: CommentPress
CommentPress is a WordPress theme that allows readers to add comments to each paragraph of a document. Comments made on a paragraph appear in a column to the right of the body of the text, aligned with the paragraph, so that the reader can read and see the comments relatively in situ. The makers of CommentPress intend authors to post long works (articles or books) in sections to a CommentPress site, and then invite people to comment much as an editor would, paragraph by paragraph in the context of the text. Alternatively, the author can invite commenters to give very targeted comments, and then readers to read the text less like the post and response of blogging and somewhat more like a conversation, or a text with related and well-situated sidebars.
As a collaborative editing paradigm, I think it would be interesting to see how effective this is compared with the Wikipedia :Talk pages (see also [1]), in which comments are closely associated with the text being written, but are not visible while one is reading the text.
; ; ; ; "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia", System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, (2007) pp. 78-78.