Commenting: challenges of another sort
It’s been a busy couple of days for me. Ignoring the beautiful weather outside, I’ve been engaged in video conversations with the Seesmic community. My previous post outlined some of the challenges I faced at the outset.
I’ve been interested to see how others on Seesmic deal with video commenting. The style is eclectic; some are better on camera than others. Some of the conversations are light banter and chatter … a bit like real-life conversation. And then a post will come along that gets everyone going, and this is within seconds!
Cathy Brooks on Seesmic began a thread a couple of days back which simply asked ‘How will video conversation change the way you comment?’ I came in late with my 2c worth, and thought this was too good not to share with you. So below (and also on Cathy’s blog and using the new Seesmic embeddable thread player) you can read what has been said so far. At the time of posting, mine was the final comment in the thread.
Without in any way gazumping the commenters, and no you probably couldn’t anyway … the expression and nuance are the meaning in many if not all posts … here were some of the issues raised:
- comment anxiety
- authenticity and commenting
- personal appearance
- difference between writing and speaking
- the implications of viral commenting
- the courage to be bare-faced about it all
Sound familiar? Some of these emerged during the conversation recently in the 31 Day Comment Challenge.
Jun 22, 2008 at 4:25 PM /
Wow, Kate, this is exciting stuff. I like the conversation you created around commenting and Seesmic. I hadn’t heard of this new technology until I somehow followed a link to this blog. It will be interesting to see what best practices around video vs. text commenting…especially in the “learning 2.0” world. Right off the bat, it seems to me that certain types of comments lend themselves to a specific approach. something like instructional technical material might be better in text. I could see the actual technical terms, for example, instead of asking “What was that word she just said?” On the other hand, there is a much greater sense of community and connection that is possible. Seeing a real, live talking face is a lot warmer than reading faceless text. That’s important to a geezer like me who works from home a lot!