4
May

Comment Challenge Day 4 - Ask a Question

   Posted by: Greg Schwartz   in Bloggery, Professional Development

Today’s mission was to ask a question in the comments on another blog. Said questions were supposed to be “open-ended and thought-provoking.” I’ve gone ahead and asked two questions.

The first stems from a post on the Langwitches blog, in which Silvia discusses adding Technorati tags to your posts. She discusses a Wordpress plugin called WP Tags to Technorati, which will do pretty much as it says: It takes the tags you enter into the Tags field in the blog post form and converts them to tags that link to Technorati. This makes sure that your post is searchable via those tags at Technorati. Except that with Wordpress, you don’t actually need to use the plugin for that to happen. After a quick exchange with Silvia in her post comments, I decided to ask the plugin’s creator what I was missing. That’s pretty open-ended, isn’t it? Haven’t received a response yet.

But then I got to thinking that this wasn’t really the type of question that activity organizers had in mind as far as though provocation was concerned. So I decided to do a little better. Kevin posted a video on his blog that quickly toured the blogs he’s visited during the Comment Challenge. It got me thinking about video commenting and so I threw the following questions in his direction:

Do you think video commenting of the variety provided by Seesmic is the future of commenting? Is it the logical evolution? Does video make conversations easier or harder? Do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?

The comment hasn’t actually been moderated yet, so of course, no response either. I’ll update when I hear back from Kevin. I’d be interested in your thoughts on video commenting, but why not hop over to Kevin’s blog and join the conversation there (unless it still hasn’t actually started, in which case feel free to comment here).

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13 comments so far

 1 

I did see your question on Kevin’s post but I will answer my thoughts here. Video commenting like you are able to do with Seesmic will get back to the user.

WE are now being given more options to engage with online tools that we are able to choose what we use based on our personal preferences. Some people like video, some audio and some text. Those that like the connections with video will love tools like Seesmic. Some bloggers are also adding plugins that allow both video and audio comments. The trouble is I feel that their comments will be less likely to be heard because it takes longer to listen to audio than to read the same amount of written text.

The benefits to me are that you are catering for people’s preferences. Negatives are accessibility and time taken to listen to comments.

What are your thoughts?

May 5th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Greg
 2 

I’m torn. The time-for-consumption problem you identify with audio is exactly the same with video. I thought about installing the Seesmic plugin, but I was concerned that it would fragment the conversation. I may do it anyway, because, as you say, it’s all about allowing for people’s diverse desires to communicate.

May 5th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
 3 

So I don’t know what the Seesmic plugin is.
Can someone enlighten me?
I take it to be some form video commenting — is that right?
(And I did post some comments back over at my blog)
Sue — your point about the quickness of reading versus being held captive to the pace of the video creator is interesting. It creates a sort of power shift, don’t you think? From reader to creator. I’ll have to ponder that a bit more.
Kevin

May 5th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Greg
 4 

Sure, Kevin. You’ve pretty much got it. The plugin is a way to implement video commenting on a Wordpress blog: http://wiki.seesmic.com/Wp-plugin

There are a number of places you can see it in action. That wiki page has a link. I think I’m going to install it, just so we can play with it a bit. I’m hoping you’ll leave a video comment, if only for my edification and sense of fulfillment.

May 5th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Greg
 5 

Seesmic in action for Kevin 

May 5th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
 6 

Greg
I just signed up and left a response to your video. Seemed easy enough.
Here is the direct link: http://seesmic.com/videos/2ieoPQFwYI
Can I embed the video here?

Give it a shot.
Kevin

May 6th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Greg
 7 

You should be able to. On the page at Seesmic that has your video, there’s an embed code. I’ll try to embed your video here and see what happens.

May 6th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Greg
 8 

So that worked fine, but you see how underneath this comment box, there’s an option for “Or add a Video Comment with?” Of course, it should say Seesmic there, but that’s a different problem. Well, when you leave a comment that way
(i.e., recording it right here on the site), you get the result you see in comment 5 on this thread. But you should just be able to play that in context here, but it doesn’t work and I don’t know why. Have put the question to Seesmic in the hopes of working it out. Thanks for playing along!

May 6th, 2008 at 6:35 am
 9 

 

May 6th, 2008 at 6:50 am
 10 

So, it does provide a screenshot but no link or embed when I used the Add a Video Comment.
(My comment is here: http://seesmic.com/videos/mDSBsLCJrV)
And I am pasting the embed code here:

Did it work?
Kevin

May 6th, 2008 at 6:53 am
 11 

You may need to be the blog admin in order to embed a video into a comment. Both times I tried, it failed to catch.
Have a nice day
Kevin

May 6th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Greg
 12 

Huh, I see the video comment in number 9, but not in number 10. Apparently, the images that are part of the Seesmic plugin are not showing, so I have some troubleshooting to do. Thanks for helping me test this out.

May 6th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Greg
 13 

Hey Kevin, looks like I’ve gotten the problem solved, as far as getting videos that are recorded here to play. See your comment #9 now.

May 6th, 2008 at 8:32 am

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