I have followed the blog if:book for some time. I have another life as a writer and the ideas about publishing expressed in the blog interest me. BTW – interest is not the same as agree.
If:book has supported the development of a theme for WordPress and it now appears the capability of the original theme have been expanded. I was aware of CommentPress before, but it seems from the If:book post that CommentPress has been transformed into a plugin for WordPress.
Here is what this change is to enable. This is WordPress blog. It uses a theme (Blog.txt) developed by Scott Wallick that controls the general appearance of the site and several plugins (e.g. Add Meta Tags) that add specific features (e.g., the tag cloud you see in the right margin). CommentPress as a theme offers the opportunity to add comments to a post on a paragraph by paragraph basis. A “button” in the margin opens a dialog box allowing comments to be added and read. WordPress is a flexible tool allowing both blog posts and also pages. The paragraph by paragraph commentary (annotation is one phrase in:Book uses to describe the opportunity) probably makes the most sense with the pages.
I think the concept with the plugin is to allow blog hosts to control when the commenting is allowed. You may not want to offer commenting for most posts, but you may want to offer a specific document and invite detailed and paragraph specific comments. This would represent a nice technique for inviting interaction and I hope I have interpreted the if:book post accurately.
I have had issues with comments. It is not the negative comments that concern me, it is the irrelevant spam that you risk spreading if you host a blog using a popular blog engine such as WordPress. It is possible to seriously limit spam, but in doing so you also make it inconvenient for anyone to add comments to your site. I assume that CommentPress would take advantage of the spam inhibitors that can be applied. This would seem to be the case with a theme, but I am less certain about how the plugin will work. I think the strategy here is to let the more adventurous give the technique a go and see what happens.
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