The Future of Commenting & Content Granularity Research

On Medium, we don't have comments on posts; instead we have "notes." They hang off to the side of paragraphs and are shown when you click/touch the little indicator on the side. Notes are one of the best parts of Medium and useful for lots of things: They help improve writing.

For some cruel reason, I keep finding myself in the position of being introduced to things in their infancy (often before they are even launched), dismissing them as stupid, and then watching them become unbelievably popular. This has happened to... | Dustin Curtis | Villain. Creator of Svbtle.

We've all clicked on an enticing link only to find that it leads to a 100-page slide show. So we half-heartedly click through a couple of slides before closing the tab in frustration. But the publisher doesn't mind. It got your pageview. An ad impression is delivered for every page that a person clicks on.

When Marc Andreessen was building the first Web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, he planned to include an annotation function. "It was a very simple implementation," says Andreessen. "I think that all I did was have the annotations show up at the end of the page."

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago. It wasn't as if those former top companies were complacent - most of them acquired and built products like crazy to avoid being displaced.

I'm in Munich, for the DLD conference, where Ben Horowitz took the opportunity to introduce the Rap Genius guys to the European digital-media crowd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAtlnh34tbY?rel=0 Since our launch about 10 months ago, Quartz hasn't had a way for you to leave comments on our articles. That's because we didn't want to bolt an average comments section onto the bottom of each article and call it a day. In our experience, that approach doesn't often lead to valuable discussion.

Things are quiet. And by that I mean nothing is on fire. The frontend is solid, the annotation service is running, and the team has turned their attention to features within the annotation admin tools. The launch of annotations has been something I've been personally excited about for a long time.

Online comments are often funnier (intentionally or otherwise) than the piece they're referring to. But most of the time, that section, far away at the bottom of the page, is best waded into in full SEAL Team 6 combat gear. But rather than relegating reader comments to the end of...

While many media players seem to have turned their backs on reader comments, or handed them over to Facebook or other third parties, there is also a wave of reinvention happening - with companies like Gawker Media turning their commenters into bloggers, and the New York Times highlighting comments inside their stories.

Comments from readers are probably one of the thorniest problems for online publishers of all kinds, both traditional media and digital-only outlets, and the methods for dealing with them are all over the map - some have given their comments over to Facebook to manage, while others like Gawker are experimenting with levelling the playing field between commenters and staff writers.

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard has raised $50 million in new funding, in a round led by Rizvi Traverse Management and Goldman Sachs. The new funding puts the valuation of the Silicon Valley startup that makes the popular social reading service at $800 million, said sources.

Chapter markers can enhance your video's engagement by giving the viewers choices to find the content they need without having to scrub through the whole video looking for it. This is especially useful when it comes to long-form content like a Google Hangout or a speech/lecture video.

Today we're updating our iPhone and Android apps, as well as Twitter.com, to make it easier to discover and follow conversations in your home timeline. From buzz about the VMAs to debates aro......

Anyone can make a post on BuzzFeed, and, in fact, some of BuzzFeed's biggest hits ever have been created by Community contributors who figured that out, made something awesome, shared it with their friends, and watched it take off either with help from a BuzzFeed editor who featured it on the front page or, sometimes just through the sheer force of its shareability.

A tech startup with roots deeply entrenched in the journalism world is being acquired. Storify, the company whose social curation platform that has helped countless journalists round-up tweets into stories of their own, is being acquired by Livefyre, best known for making the software that powers comment sections on some websites.

This post is about a new reddit feature, multireddits. If you'd like to join the gold beta test, head to /r/multibeta for more info. reddit is vast. Unfathomably, mindbogglingly vast. There were over 71 million unique visitors last month. Yesterday, there were 5,487 active subreddits.

Wikipedia, which turns 10 this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. But it has become a crucial aspect of our lives, and in many ways it has shown us what all information online is becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic.

The Comments box is a social plugin that enables people to comment on your site. Features include moderation tools and distribution. Social Relevance: The Comments box uses social signals to surface the highest quality comments. Comments are ordered to display the most relevant comments from friends and friends of friends as well as the most-liked or active discussion threads.

500 Startups-backed Markerly has added a new feature to its microcontent service that will allow publishers to have readers leave comments on any image on the site. Website owners need only insert a small piece of code to make this happen.

Wherein it's my job to bootstrap the newspaper's online connections to local bloggers and community members, launch hyperlocal sites comprised mostly of stories written by The People Formerly Known As The Audience, and manage them.

You might have heard about the website RapGenius when it raised $15 million from Marc Andreessen's venture firm and thought to yourself that this was a strange investment for the former Netscape founder: a site that allows music fans to annotate rap lyrics.

A few days ago, Pinterest announced that it'll be rolling out an ad platform. (I guess it was only a matter of time, right?) But the social network's not stopping there with the changes! Today, it announced something I think inbound marketers would be really pumped about: there's a new type of pin!