Interaction

Interacting with the Website

Written by Pierce Presley Monday, February 08 2010 12:12

I remember when one of the TV stattions I grew up with was showing editorials read by the station manager. At the end, they would always have voiceover guy number three say something along the lines of responses being welcomed and you could drop by the station between noon and 12:10 on alternate Wednesdays of months that are wholly divisible by three. Strangely, I don't remember ever seeing such a response.

The Web turns this on its head. Readers can respond to your work at any time, nearly instantaneously and even while doing other things at the same time. Just be glad no one's figured out how to lash up ChatRoulette and Intense Debate. (Seesmic came close with a Wordpress plugin for video comments, but they required you to be a registered user. Seesmic has since become just another Twitter client.) 

At best, you'll have interested readers who ask good questions, flesh out your reporting, tell their friends about you and buy you a steak dinner every Friday. At worst, you'll have the kind of trolls (people who live to pick arguments on the Internet) who troll about things you've never even covered.

I'd kind of like you to be the first kind, though truth be told I'll take the second. (I was disappointed the time someone wrote a long, detailed letter to the editor castigating me for word choice … and sent it to the wrong newspaper. A prophet is not without honor and all that.) To make this happen, I've put in comments, forums and a wiki.

Comments are attached to a particular article, though goodness knows they've been known to wander pretty far afield. There is a convention where some blogs post a basically empty article just so the commentariat can have an "open thread" to discuss any topic. (P.Z. Myers's Pharyngula blog has an open thread that has gone through 48 consecutive iterations at more than 666 comments per article, equaling something over 32,000 comments. But he's a rock star among bloggers.) Unless something's broken, there should be a comment link or box below this article. Comments on JFF are not moderated, though I reserve the right to do so if it becomes necessary. Contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with any complaints.

Forums (or fora if you're classically inclined) are electronic discussion boards generally organized around a topic. While it'd be nice if you linked to an article (or category or section, or even if you linked the other way, to a forum post from a comment), it's not required.

A wiki is basically a user-edited document. While comments and forums will allow you to talk about articles and subjects, wikis let you get in there and write a whole new page or edit what's already there like a slot desker on speed. The software will log your Internet address (or your username if you decide to create one—the wiki's user base is separate from the rest of the site, sorry) and the changes you make. One of the things I'm hoping to put in there is the text of every article on the site, so you can poke around and hopefully expand, improve and update the content.