obligatory comments + colosseum filtering
Google is always just a step behind the avant-garde, which is impressive for a large company. They've just added this thing searchwiki, which allows you to comment on results and vote them up or down. That seems to me like an emerging consensus: Comments should be allowed on everything, at worst tucked far away (as these new Google comments (unfortunately) so far are). Why trust something that doesn't allow comments? What has it got to hide?
And furthermore this most base style of commentary is emerging: Thumbs up or thumbs down. Some sort of colosseum we're all entering! It's odd; I feel in the end it must be a phase. But for the moment it's unquestionably better than what we had before: Comments used to be almost universally sorted by date, which leads either to a scrolling empty newness or to the even bizarrer world of "first post!" Community editing is surely imperfect, but compared to that unfiltered firehose it seems a dawning light of rationality.
So those two parts together form a somewhat working system: Everything allows comments, and colosseum filtering makes those comments relevant and rational. Until something better comes along, I expect that model to gradually permeate everything.
And furthermore this most base style of commentary is emerging: Thumbs up or thumbs down. Some sort of colosseum we're all entering! It's odd; I feel in the end it must be a phase. But for the moment it's unquestionably better than what we had before: Comments used to be almost universally sorted by date, which leads either to a scrolling empty newness or to the even bizarrer world of "first post!" Community editing is surely imperfect, but compared to that unfiltered firehose it seems a dawning light of rationality.
So those two parts together form a somewhat working system: Everything allows comments, and colosseum filtering makes those comments relevant and rational. Until something better comes along, I expect that model to gradually permeate everything.