Why is “inline” blog commenting not popular?
I’m curious why out of the millions of blogs that exist, why “inline” blog commenting isn’t more common than it is? Most people are familiar and comfortable with the concept already in Microsoft Word — it’s pretty common to turn on “comments” in a document (see my technical drawing illustrated below).
I’m sure there are several things to think through in regards to the overall usability design in handling multiple comments for a single sentence or area on a blog post (or how you view every one’s comments instead of just one area of the blog post). However, the concept of clicking the area in which you would like to comment is an intuitive interface behavior, rather than putting comments at the end of a blog post.
LineBuzz seems to be the only developer that has tackled this idea so far (I could be wrong, that’s all I could find). Frankly, I think their execution sucks. It’s a great stab at a “first try”, but their interface misses the mark. My own personal opinion is that inline commenting would be well adopted if executed right — rather than what other seem to think is the future of commenting, which is video blog commenting programs like Seesmic.
Just some thoughts…
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When I read an article or blog post, I read the whole piece (or the majority of it) before I form an opinion. If I stop every other sentence or paragraph to read someone’s comments, I probably would get annoyed and stop reading.
Inline commenting would just disrupt the idea flow of any post… and who wants to read something that has MS Word copy-editor vomit all over it? It would be like having a blog seizure.
Valid point, like I said it’s all about the execution. Close attention to a friendly interface design would have to be taken into consideration.
It can be done — take for instance Viddler’s video comments. A lot of people thought that could never be done well in which you could watch a video and view comments without it being confusing.
I think it would be a cool execution if it could be done with Javascript, but it would ultimately be all about execution. And what do you do if JS isn’t enabled?
I’m more with Whitney. Viddler’s works because it’s adding textual comment to another format. To add text upon text would just seem like noise to me. It would probably be like those annoying sites that have inline contextual ads that popup when you accidently roll over them in the text.