They also blog who only sit and comment… (Commentariat 2)

Principal coding work on a suite of “commentariat” functions is complete. The result consists of three interconnected pages, of which one, “State of the Discussion” (SoD), is available from a main menu link, while the other two, “Comments This Thread” (CTT) and “Commenter Archives” (CA), will be accessible via icon-links available on each comment where it appears in comment threads, as well as within the SoD:

State of the Discussion

Answering a request initially from “Will Truman,” Contributing Editor at Ordinary Times, SoD portrays “the site upside down,” beginning with the most recent comments. Each item as displayed features the commenter, his or her avatar, the comment text or excerpt, and links to the full text, to the commented-on post, to the comment replied-to if any, and, via CTT and CA, to other comments by the same commenter either on the same thread or on other posts as archived. Individual comments are color-coded by post to make associating them easier, and also to provide an at-a-glance “heat map” of discussion at any given time. The entire output is paginated, and will be adjusted so that the full-width/columnar desktop display resolves to a simple sequential display on small screens.

State of the Discussion

The two icons that appear at the lower left of the individual comment-excerpt boxes link, respectively, to CTT and CAA.

As for the former:

Comments This Thread

Frequently as a commenter, when I’m engaged in discussion, I want to be able view the other commenter’s statements, or prior additional statements, while responding. At other times, I may run across someone who has said something notable on a particular topic, and I will be curious whether he or she has had more to say, or I’ll wonder where a particular exchange began.

By clicking on the CTT icon, the commenter will be able to bring up a new overlay page showing just the particular commenter’s comments offered on that discussion, in reverse chronological order.

Comments This Thread Are Go

At the bottom of the popped-up page, users can find another link to the given commenter’s archive of comments going back to the misty origins of all existence, or, rather, to his or her first comment ever at the site…

Commenter Archives

Open Commenter Archive

…or, really rather, all the way back to the first ever comment associated with his or her or zir or for all we know their email address: If the commenter happens also to be a registered user, then the code will seek all associated comments – so covering multiple email addresses – but, if you change email addresses or comment from different accounts, the archive will be incomplete: You can try registering for an account at this or whatever site the feature is installed or you can try, in the future, to be more consistent in establishing your own record of argument, but that’s up to you, and for now the objective is to add some useful background to discussions, not to perform volunteer identity tracking for government security agencies (maybe later!).

So the possibly incomplete paginated archive will look like something like this:

Commenter Archive

Next Steps

These features are all, obviously, in their early, unbackfed stages, and will have to be customized on a per-installation basis, not distributed as a one-size-fits-mostly all basis. I think they’re stable enough to try out at a busy blog like OT (they seem to be working on my development version of the site).

Changes like these don’t fully equalize blogger and commenter, or turn commenters into full-fledged bloggers, but they point to a completion of the circle or continuation of the spiral that I discussed last year in the Read the Comments! series.

Empowering or “realizing” the Commentariat in this way is one way to traverse the spiral conceptually and practically. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I expect to return to this position or to an homologous one again, but I think, pending feedback and suggestions, I can now justify focusing attention, at least as far as blog development goes, more at the author’s or site-right-side-up level – including by laying out the theory underlying the above graphic in more detail, and in relation to recent political-philosophical discussion here as well as at OT.