Interested in enabling online group discussion/analysis of a text? Such as Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? CommentPress, a project of The Institute for the Future of the Book, was a WordPress theme that enabled paragraph-level commenting. The comments appeared next to the paragraphs, instead of being relegated to the end of the page, making for a much more natural and engaging experience. There has been talk of an updated version of CommentPress for months — and it is here, renamed as digress.it. It is now a full featured WordPress plug-in which works in both the single and multi-user versions. And you can even have your projects hosted on their site. This is a powerful idea, well executed, and a natural for a host of classroom/educational uses.
The original team of CommentPress is pleased to announce the launch of digress.it (http://digress.it), a WordPress plugin and online community that offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. digress.it is based in the architecture of weblogs, but is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length.
digress.it represents a complete rewrite of the original CommentPress code and adds a great deal of power, flexibility and nuance. Out of the box, digress.it supports threaded commeting, real-time commenting (with concurrent users on the site), drag and drop interface, a comment browser that allows you to slice and dice the conversation in different ways, URL addressable comments, paragraph embedding and RSS feeds of specific users and paragraphs. But we’re just getting started! digress.it is under active development and we plan to release new features regularly. So your feedback is crucial!
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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