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See, I'm not just a photoshopping clown all the time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the paradigm what we commonly think of as “blog comments” can be improved upon, either specifically for tumblelogs or for online content in general. Granted, perhaps 90% of this question comes down to user preference: After all, many people enable comments on their Tumblr accounts in the very same way that users have since the first blogs appeared on the net — and they like it. But I just can’t bring myself to do that again.

I don’t want comments in this format for several reasons, some of which I can’t even put my finger on. I like having control of everything that’s written on my site, I like keeping the focus on the content, and I like not having to worry about stupid people.

But here’s what I would want: A quick way for somebody to send me a short message directly from the Tumblr dashboard or public-facing post in a lightbox-style overlay. Point #1: I’m thinking the Twitter standard of 140 characters is a good place to start, because I don’t want a treatise. If you want to write the great American novella in response to my post, then reblog it and write your own post underneath and we both win. Point #2: I’m thinking the response gets delivered to me as some type of “private” message. I can surely choose to subsequently post it or tweet it or smoke-signal it, but I believe a direct response is more conducive to the kind of dialog I’m looking for — whether it’s a question about something or a simple “Nice!”

You could say I envision a “like” button that takes a textual voicemail.

I’ve thought about kludges to get to something resembling this, but nothing solid has presented itself. Twitter direct messages could be an interesting conduit, but you can’t send me a DM if I’m not following you. Past that problem, it’d still need a Greasemonkey or equivalent script to tie into the entire Tumblr experience. That’s into ugly hack territory for me, and I’m not quite down with that.

And now, back to the show.

29 notes on tumblr

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  1. ohsusquehanna reblogged this from topherchris and added:
    Sounds like you need...service like Disqus but solely
  2. topherchris posted this