Tom Ewing muses on the shift in drive-by commenting. I've seen, and participating, in this new form of social pile-on commenting and it does make me feel a little uncomfortable. Unless the person on the receiving end of the pile-on is a twat, of course. ;)

In the "wretched hive of scum and villainy" of the NYT comment threads a community of poets is thriving. Fascinating example of a cuckoo community.

The money quote here is "many newspapers still see comments as some kind of necessary evil: a bone tossed to readers to help drive traffic, but something that produces little else of value." And they wonder why their comments are a cess-pool?

How popular sites deal with comments from their readers is an ongoing debate and one for which there isn't a simple or universal answer, but reading this a thought occurred to me. Maybe conversation simply doesn't scale to these sites. You need some sort of limit or restriction be it numbers or subject or a more nebulous notion of community rules. This might explain why newspapers in particular who are trying to be all things to all people suffer so badly. All people talking about all things is always going to be messy.

Matt Haughey on the 10th aniversary of Metafilter, the first community weblog (I think). Someone needs to write the book on Metafilter - if they have do let me know - since it's a wonderful case study on how online communities work.

"Tom Steinberg once said that that, on the web; ‘If you don’t want a fight, don’t set up a boxing ring and invite people in‘. Good community sites follow this maxim and create a climate in which people don’t get abusive. Traditional newspaper websites of course don’t – by setting up a story as a ‘controversial issue’, you invite people to have a scrap."

The Birmingham Post has had a regular troll by the name of Clifford, except he wasn't a malicious troll in the usual sense. He genuinely seemed to care about the direction the paper was going. So Jo Geary invited him into the offices and recorded this fascinating interview. Well worth the time of anyone involved in managing comments on a large-ish site.

Very detailed explanation of how they moderate comments. Could be useful to those managing a large community site where things gets a bit fractious at times.

Joanna Geary on lessons learned from an anonymous misogynistic attack left in her comments.