Why is “inline” blog commenting not popular?

tech news & insight — Tags: , , — ramseymohsen @ Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 - 2:36 am

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…


(c) 2012 Ramsey Mohsen