It would be neat to pull in responses to or retweets of a publicize action back into the context of the original post. Furthermore, those external reactions should be ingested in a structured manner, and the comments iA should reflect the nature of type of reaction.

This isn’t a new idea as it’s been done before but it’s still something to be vastly improved.

Happy Cog has a new commenting system on their Cognition blog. Keep your comment within 120 characters and tweet a link to the post, or write a response on your own blog and report the URL. Drives brevity and accountability. Intriguing experiment. (via Mike Monteiro)

Upgrading newsroom culture is one part of it, I believe, but the right tools have to be in place first so that participants in this new culture shift doesn’t run into barriers of frustration. I think strides can be made on both the frontend and backend of a news organization website. As a part of the user experience, comments shouldn’t require user registration but rather should be able to “sign in” with Facebook Connect or OpenID, or leave a comment with an email address to be verified once. If someone wants to add information to the discussion anonymously, I think that should be a submission form separate from the comment thread. The web is a global commons where news organizations should be facilitating intelligent conversations.

News Mixer has taken radical steps in regards to how the format of the comment, or contribution more accurately, shapes conversation. “Quips” encourage commenters to keep conversation sweet and concise, and “Questions” and “Answers” help define the quality of the article. I think it would be valuable if the community also could build on top of the information presented in an article by clarifying with their own perspective or submitting links to related context. News Mixer offers the ability to respond with questions and answers to specific paragraphs within an article; it would be sweet if someone writing a blog post could link to unique grafs within an article too as a way of building a more specific map of conversation. I also appreciate how the New York Times has “Editor’s Picks” which help distinguish signal from noise. Reporters and editors on a news website should be empowered to curate comments as a way of facilitating conversation.

Part of improving commenting will come from better tools on the administration side too. Comment moderation should be more granular, meaning that, instead of having an “Online Editor” who manages all conversations on the website, each reporter should be responsible for owning the full spectrum of discussion about their beat. WordPress, a publishing platform I’m quite familiar with, only one email notification option. Instead, reporters should be the ones approving new comments. In addition, it would be sweet to have a commenting system that recorded and presented more information about the respondent, including the number of times they had already left a comment, the topics they most commonly leave comments on, and any profile or background information either from what they’ve entered in the system or their Facebook Profile. Reporters and editors would be able to leave private notes about the commenters for future discussion moderation, and privately rate the perceived “quality” of the contribution. All of this information about the community’s contributions would be stored in a CRM database to provide value to the reporting process too.

There’s a lot of space for cool improvements in commenting systems. It’s just about building it in iterations and then experimenting.

In Mark’s scenario (borrowed from Stack Overflow), the reputation system would be used to identify the good comments from the cruft. If you post a good comment other people think adds to the conversation, then they might vote you up. You’d earn reputation points from that transaction. If you were trolling to derail the conversation or intentionally trying to provoke, then the community could vote you down and you’d lose reputation points. The author of the post, furthermore, could use his or her super reputation to bestow blessings upon really intelligent feedback. All of this information about the quality of content would be useful to the CMS and webmaster, and editor I suppose, in trying to determine what gets placement where.

The kicker is when you tie this reputation system into the database that’s tracking people in your community. This is where things could get really interesting. By adding semantic information to the reputation system (i.e. recording the topic that the commenter is writing on and saving structured data about the nature of their response), you could build a super useful for finding the diamonds in the rough. For instance, if Marcus Doe (a fake name to protect his identity) commented often on articles about climate change and water access issues, and his fellow commenters rated his insights highly, then Marcus’ profile in the database would indicate that the crowd seems to think he makes fair arguments. The news organization would then invite Marcus to contribute a guest article. If the readers then found that contribution valuable, it would increase Marcus’ profile as a source of knowledge about climate change and water access within the community. This would only work with real, verifiable commenters, of course.

This reputation system would be the engine to empower the community to evaluate information and sources for merit.

On another note, I believe we interviewed Rich Gordon for tomorrow’s edition of This Week in CoPress. I was out in the field doing research, but am definitely looking forward to hearing about his future plans for the project.