Seesmic Threaded Discussions: Have Conversation, Will Travel

Seesmic seems to have ignited – or perhaps more appropriately re-ignited – a small controversy regarding distributed commenting with an update of their embeddable player. The player had already supported a video reply option (for recording directly within the embedded instance), as well as an ability to create a new Seesmic account directly from the player, however the new point of contention surrounds threaded video commenting.

In the case of the pre-existing plugin for WordPress (which I discussed here), as well as its inclusion in Disqus, video comments are posted inline along with text. In effect users browsing through reader feedback and discussion will run across both text and video in the commenting convention of descending chronological order.

The embed update effectively eliminates this and instead displays video replies within the player itself. As the Inquisitr points out, this has the effect of creating a self-contained and comprehensive account of the video discussion that can be embedded anywhere because “the entire conversation [is delivered] where ever the embed is shown.”

TechCrunch argues this amounts to nothing less than hijacking the discussion, saying:

“It is a pretty cool feature, but it creates a conflict with all the sites that have embedded Seesmic functionality, such as TechCrunch. We love it when people use Seesmic to comment on posts, and there is certainly something to say for threaded comments. Sometimes you want to respond to comment No. 15, but you are comment No. 74. But if these responses become swallowed within the Seesmic player itself, then it effectively gets taken out of the comment stream of that particular post.”

My two cents on this is that both options present enormous potential – particularly for users who wish to fully capitalise on the power of video rather than simply include the option as a value-add for commenters. Video does so much more to convey the subtleties of conversation than text ever could – from conveying undertones (sarcasm, jest, humour) to cultural elements (bowing), and non-verbal communication (body language) – and this is exactly the sort of communication that Seesmic is designed for.

In the case of education I see the new threaded commenting feature in the embeddable player as enormously valuable as it would enable instructors and students to create a single reusable forum for a discussion topic that could be distributed across several blogs – if not an entire classroom.

Just imagine the example of a discussion exercise in a language class for students learning Japanese. The embeddable player could be included in each student’s blog along with their personal thoughts on the topic in text – and thus harness a blog’s reflective potential – as well as provide a vehicle for an ongoing collaborative activity with their peers.

The Seesmic WordPress plugin just couldn’t do that as it’s designed to work within a single blog post.

Replies would of course be located and visible on the Seesmic site as well, however they’re not bundled in the way they are in the embeddable player.

The other advantage of the embeddable player is that it picks up responses to the clip that are posted from the Seesmic site as well as via the embeddable player (I’ve tested this successfully elsewhere). The threads featured in the embeddable player would therefore be arguably more comprehensive than the WordPress Plugin.

Having said that though I do think the WordPress Plugin is valuable in it’s own right – particularly because it follows the traditional convention of inline, chronologically listed comments and replies.

There’s no reason why you need to choose between one or the other however. For example you could include the WordPress plugin for more frequent usage on more site-specific content, and then include the embeddable player whenever you wanted to expand the pool of discussion to include off-site users as well.

Unfortunately due to the perhaps excessive restrictions of WordPress.com I’m not able to use either option here. I hope this is a temporary issue that will be resolved in time, because I’m currently considering moving this blog to a self-hosted WordPress instance where I’ll be afforded more flexibility and opportunity to properly explore these options.

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