1. 

   Patrick Picard
   November 18th, 2009 - 18:56

   A rating system would be nice (1-5 stars)
2. 

   Yancy Lent
   November 18th, 2009 - 18:59

   Tried that. Didn’t go anywhere. However an anonymous system; based on the same hit counter principal, might work.
3. 

   Ed Maloney
   November 18th, 2009 - 20:10

   PL has definitely not jumped the shark!
4. 

   Keith Brooks
   November 18th, 2009 - 22:17

   PL hasn’t jumped yet but the problem is, I think, similar to why RSS feeds don’t work for most people, personally I don’t use them but I have a quite a few setup in various places, including my notes client.
   Time
   No one has any. and if you are like me and don’t read for a day or traveling don’t catch up you start to either feel lost or wondering why you bothered reading to start.
   If there is/was a better way to find everything and read it, I haven’t seen it on my desktop yet.
   inline comments might work but don’t care much for facebook so this doesn’t do anything for me I guess, but I can see what you are after with it. But this takes away from screen real estate which is something I am not in favor of.
5. 

   Yancy Lent
   November 18th, 2009 - 22:24

   “But this takes away from screen real estate which is something I am not in favor of.”

   Real estate is something I take seriously as well and if people start using it there are many ways to reduced it’s impact.
6. 

   Chris Toohey
   November 18th, 2009 - 23:02

   The anti-community sentiments toward community contributions will never cease to amaze me… Yancy, you’re doing great work and providing our community with some really sweet resources, which in turn help us spread the word far beyond the “yellow bubble”.

   And for that, I thank you.

   I will also give every effort to *improve* those resources any chance I can give — it’s the only way after all that I can give you an educated opinion on the given topic.

   That being said, I actually like the idea of the comments, as it gives me the ability to see who’s “talking up” the given post. The UX could be better, ie: instead of the page-to-form/thread navigation, an AJAX-based popup comment form floating over the given post. But now I’m just giving you ideas on v2.0
7. 

   Bob Balfe
   November 19th, 2009 - 11:32

   I personally don’t mind it at all. I post all of my blog postings on Twitter and FB and many people reply on FB and many reply on my blog. In my mind if they replied then they probably read it so it doesn’t bother me.

   I definitely don’t think PL has jumped shark. I am constantly promoting it in my presentations as THE PLACE to go for Lotus discussions.
8. 

   Chris Miller
   November 19th, 2009 - 11:44

   How do we get notified about these comments? How do we interact? Can we grab the comments as RSS per posting to import into our own? I don’t think ownership of the comments concerns me at all, as chatter goes on numerous sites all the time about a posting. It is more towards is PL as an aggregator the place to have commenting? Can there be a simple # bubble or something next to the entry showing there is comments to save the UI real estate?
9. 

   Declan Lynch
   November 19th, 2009 - 13:26

   Quite a lot of blogs also publish a ‘per article’ comments feed, the link to which is part of the blogs’s item rss feed.

   Could you pull this in for blogs that support it and show the comments from the actual blog? That will move the ownership of the comments to the blog. Also blogs that support it in the RSS feed would have a link to the page to create new comments, some even have a web service to create comments.

   Expanding the #bubble idea in Chris’s comment above if the rss feed of the blog you are reading supports the number of comments tag you could use that for the bubble to let people know how many comments there are on a particular blog entry.
10. 

    Yancy Lent
    November 19th, 2009 - 14:42

    @Declan, the overhead of your ideas is through the roof. I have been looking into ways of incorporating comments since the site was launched and NOTHING is consistent. I’m lucky if i get feeds that are valid, have more then 3 fields elements or are encoded correctly let alone have the functionality your talking about. Even if many of them did, what about the ones that don’t? How would i address that? Everyone would want it and id have to accommodate on a blog by blob basis because most users don’t have control over their blogs.

    @Chris, good point, there should be a feed, and there will be if people use it. The absence of feed isn’t effecting the adaption rate however if the adaption rate increases a feed will be created. As for the number of comments, it’s there, next to the icon, and all comments are listed under the post.

    Thanks @Bob!

    @Chris, the UX will improve with adaption, the current UX is a good test for the feature, if people aren’t willing to jump through what small hoops there is then it tells something about the demand of the feature.
11. 

    Andrew Pollack
    November 19th, 2009 - 16:35

    Hi Yancy — First, let me take some ownership of being one of the people to send you a note saying this may be pushing the boundary a bit between aggregating content and redirecting it. Hopefully I did that in a way that wasn’t critical of the work you’ve done here and keep doing. People with strong objects can always take their football and go home, and as I said, it isn’t something I feel strongly enough about to take that approach.

    Planet Lotus has been good for the community and continues to be.

    That said, I think the same thing I said in email can be said here; and maybe add to the discussion that way:

    I think the facebook model is a really good framework for the discussion. When I blog, Facebook is configured to pick it up and post it to that site. Their reply system then can sometimes take precedence over the one on the site because people will read the content there and never click the link. In both cases, I can opt out of automatic updates and thus the comment system. In the case of Facebook I can remove the post, or delete any comment I don’t like.

    I think with yours, a few things would help it fit better into the blog ecosystem:

    #1 – If someone does comment, it should notify by email the person who runs the blog.

    #2 – The blog owner should have the ability to remove a comment (or all comments) — possibly with an editors mark replacing it saying “comment removed at bloggers request”.

    #3 – The blog owner should have an opt out option to not allow comments on all their posts (or better on specific ones). Most blogs offer this functionality so that when you post something controversial (or accidentally raise everyone’s hackles) or for some other reason you don’t want replies, you can do that.

    #4 – Comments should be very limited in size/scope. I think the “___ likes this” facebook functionality is a good example. If it were something like “like/don’t like/thanks/congrats” it would do very well. If it were a very short comment (50 chars or so) that would be my second favorite. The idea is you’d be able to express a very short sentiment, but not excoriate someone or self promote in that space. (though in 50char, you could still post a link or write “bullshit, you liar” or something). The thing is, you’re providing a place for potential troll behavior where the author can’t control it.

    These are of course, just my own preferences. I’m not sure it will matter much to most people — and it’s not something I’m going to lose sleep over.
12. 

    Yancy Lent
    November 19th, 2009 - 17:05

    @Andrew, thanks for the ideas. Unfortunately many of them are predicated on something that doesn’t exist at the site. There is no concept of blog owners having an account where they can manage there blog info, comments made about it, manage email notifications, etc. The genie is out of the bottle and mapping blog ownership to accounts for 340+ blogs would have to first happen before all could join in.

    As always it’s ideas like this that make the site better and for that I thank you.
13. 

    Andrew Pollack
    November 19th, 2009 - 17:22

    While it doesn’t solve ALL the problems, I believe the RSS/XML feed data does contain the email address of the blog’s responsible party, that may be a way to do the notifications.

    Of course, if PL was written on a Domino server, it’d be easy to use that to tie in the owner’s account with their PL login (if they have one) but then, that’s a Notes guy talking — we tend to view data in a more flexible way than relational people do.
14. 

    Yancy Lent
    November 19th, 2009 - 18:09

    @Andrew

    “We”, when was I excommunicated? Just because I chose another technology to create the site doesn’t mean I’m not a Notes guy.

    As for using the email address. If only you saw the feeds I get. You’d quickly come to the concussion that many don’t follow the standard. Just to confirm, I chose at random a feed from the last 5 sent, the first one didn’t have an email address so i gave up proving the point further.

    The way I’d map the blogs to accounts is to replicate the method Technorati uses. It would be very easy to implement, just not sure what it will get me and what follow on issues it will expose.

    As for flexibility, yes Domino is flexible at the cost of scaling and performance with large data sets; I cringe to say this but we both know it’s true.
15. 

    Andrew Pollack
    November 19th, 2009 - 18:19

    lol, we don’t want to go into the scale issue here — I think you have to carefully define scale at WAY above where most people or most sites need to worry about it before you move past where Domino can’t manage it.

    We’ll table that one though — another time.
16. 

    Yancy Lent
    November 19th, 2009 - 19:06

    And leave the readers hanging?

    Profiles and feeds 426
    Blog Posts 50,743
    Hit Table (ensuring one click per ip and computer) 2,821,992 (fields include ip, timestamp, location id, profile id, blogpost id, and random cookie value) and every record has to be unique.

    Make each a form or their own database, whichever you choose. Now put them all together and list 100 at a time in descending order by date with pagination. I will gladly give you this data to reproduce if you think Notes could generate this view in under .6 seconds, on an equivalent server/pc, which is essentially a slow desktop by today’s standards. If you’d like… and to truly replicate this you’d have to include the the load of everyone adding records to the hit table, so we’d need a load generator, not to mention all the Google crawl entries that are stripped out every hour on schedule.

    UPDATE: to conclude, you are correct you have to have a very large data set to consider an other platforms, I only wrote this to show that the platform I chose was a practical fit.

    Come on Andrew, tell me this isn’t fun to consider
17. 

    Andrew Pollack
    November 19th, 2009 - 23:25

    I’d need to talk more about some specific details, but yes, I believe I could produce this in domino with excellent performance — though I’m not entirely convinced I’d take the same approach you describe to do it.

    Honestly, I wouldn’t assume for sure that I could without knowing a whole lot more about the site than I do.

    The other side of the coin I’d point out, however, is that the time it takes you to make changes is much greater than if you were using Domino.

    If you’re going to be at LS2010, I’m doing a session called Performance in the Real World and maybe you’ll see if I have some ideas there.
18. 

    Yancy Lent
    November 20th, 2009 - 09:59

    I conceded the flexibility point, but there are design trade offs there as well.. We’ll table that one though — another time.

    As for the site, you know it well, pretend a customer asked you to reproduce it, don’t forget all the other data that shows up there in the left hand nav. It could make a great example in your session.

    I might very well attend your performance session. I attend your sessions every year, security sessions, and this with only getting to attend 2 sessions a year; count of working on the showcase floor.
19. 

    Andrew Pollack
    November 20th, 2009 - 13:00

    As I’m updating the presentation, I’ll keep Planet Lotus in mind and maybe some additional ideas or comments will come to me.

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