writetoreply.org – Some Quick Thoughts

So it’s been a fun couple of days getting the writetoreply.org site up and seeing the first few comments roll in to the commentable version of the Digital Britain Interim report.

We made the Guardian Technology blog tonight – Digital Britain: Comments please! – and I can only reiterate the point Jack Schofield made in it:

So far, however, WriteToReply.org has only had 10 comments, spread over six sections and dozens of paragraphs.

I hope this is because not enough people know about it, rather than because not enough people care.

So have you commented yet? (I will as soon as I finish commenting on the POIT report, which I’m still half-way through!;-)

As we get more comments, we maybe able to roll out a few new features, and it will also give us something to work with on a comment dashboard/reporting pattern that we can make available to the report’s authors.

Also, be warned that I’m not going to post too much here about the site – we’ll be starting a blog [UPDATE: available at http://writetoreply.ord/actually] on the writetoreply site itself in a day or to capture what we’re learning and what we’re thinking – so if you’re interested in keeping close tabs on what we’re up to, I’d suggest following @writetoreply on Twitter. (I will post round up/summary linking reports here, though, so you’ll still get to see glimpses of what we’re doing ;-)

If you want to get involved with brainstorming ideas for the site – or suggesting reports to host there – please send a message to @WriteToReply or contribute to the wiki: WriteToReply wiki

One thing I do want to mention here – almost as a note to self, because I’ll pursue this more on the WriteToReply blog – is that even if we don’t get many comments on the site, there is still value in it being there…

Why?

Because each paragraph is identified by a named anchor, each paragraph is linked to by a unique URI; for example, here’s a link to Action 1 of the Digital Britain Interim Report:

What this means is that if people want to comment about a particular section, action or paragraph within the report on their own blog or other publication, they can link to it.

Like in this post from the Nominet blog – :

A Storm in a Teacup or a Perfect Storm?

Which results in a Trackback on the WriteToReply site, that is included in the comment feed, and that looks this:

(Note that this is where we have to start upping the spam/trackback spam defense tools!;-)

What this means is that the paragraph, action point, section or whatever can become a linked resource, or linked context, and can support remote commenting.

And in turn, the remark made on the third party site can become a linked annotation to the corresponding part of the original report…

How?

Well through the judicious use of trackbacks, link: search limits on the bigger search engines, and link searches in services like BackType (that I discovered via Euan Semple:-), we’ll find ways of pulling those remote comments and discussions into the writetoreply environment (hopefully…?!;-)

So even if you don’t want to comment on the Digital Britain Interim report on the WriteToReply site, but you do care, why not post your thoughts on your own blog, and link your thoughts directly back to the appropriate part of the report on WriteToReply?

(And remember, the final report will have consequences, so if you have something to contribute, make sure you do… :-)