Web 2.0 meets book discussions
The 9/28/07 Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on a new Wordpress theme called CommentPress. With CommentPress readers can submit their comments directly into an online text — comments that can be seen and commented on by others. Its basically the digital version of writing in a book’s margins.
Its pretty cool too — comments are ties to a specific paragraph. Comments can be viewed for an entire page or on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. You can submit you own comments on a paragraph, or reply to someone’s existing comment. Here’s an example using the President’s Address to the Nation. The real innovation is that the comments appear in a side pane, alongside the text you’re commenting on, rather than at the bottom of a page as with a typical blog post. I can see many possible uses — for instance a teacher can provide reading with their own comments/notes/observations etc. for a class to read. Or a class can share comments and discussion of a text.
CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.
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