Donna Fontenot › Comments

I thought the author of the post handled the web 1.0 issue very well. It does require not skimming the article though, which I am often guilty of. But summary: It *appears* to users that the comments are ON the site, rather than on a 3rdparty site, so that makes it different especially when site owners cannot control what's said. If you allow commenting on your site, u still have control. You don't with 3rd party, but at least it's obvious that it's 3rd party. Not so with sidewiki. Perception is reality. - Donna Fontenot

When I view pages with Sidewiki entries, I can open the Sidewiki or not, it's not implicitly a part of the page. It's a bit different with the permalinks to Sidewiki entries (which again, now have a noindex robots meta tag), but when viewing pages on the web it's pretty clear to me that Sidewiki is separate from the page. It's the same as when I view pages with the Digg bar on top. I like the ability to check out the comments there, sometimes the discussions are pretty valuable. - John μller

There's always a potential for spam when it comes to allowing users to create content, but there are a lot of good models out there that help work against spam & abuse (I don't see much of that here on FriendFeed for instance). - John μller

but again, friendfeed isn't on my site, or yours. sidewiki is - sorta - again - perception. huge difference there. spam or not. - Donna Fontenot