Reintroducing the paragraph

One reason blogging is popular is because readers can easily post comments about what the author has written. One reason blogging is less popular among higher ed is that, until now, the tools have been limited to commenting on an entire article. The comments typically come at the end of a post, and typically in chronological order. With such limitations, it is difficult to have several lines of thinking or dicussion that remain coherent for more than a few comments.

This forces bloggers to post single-idea posts of one or two paragraphs if a discussion is expected. Either depth of writing or specificity of comments are sacrificed.

A Wordpress plugin called CommentPress from the Institute for the Future of the Book promises to free thoughtful blogging from those restraints, and to reintroduce the paragraph as a unit of thought to writing and digital publishing. CommentPress places a comment bubble next to each paragraph and allows readers to comment specifically on that paragraph. The comments are tallied under the little bubble ("2" means there are two comments on this paragraph) and the comments can be read in a floating, scrolling window. Click here for an example of how it works.

What results is a kind of digital marginalia, not merely from the author or a single reader, but as an interchange of ideas between the author and the readers. I have WordPress installed on a server; perhaps I'll post a few entries and see how it goes.

The Institute for the Future of the Book is one of many Web 2.0 software developers who are not merely taking the tools we have and putting them on the web, but rethinking what it means to be an author, or a reader, in the Digital Age. I'll have more to say about the Institute later.