LineBuzz inline comments set for viral adoption
By Vivek | May 13th, 2007 at 03:07 pm ET
Since the cat is out of the bag, let’s talk about it. Couple of weeks back, I got time to hookup with Mark Maunder from Geojoey, who along with his wife Kerry, are always upto developing some really cool apps. While traffic at Geojoey is taking it’s time to pickup, both of them have been working on a smart new app - LineBuzz.
Aimed for viral adoption, LineBuzz let’s readers on blogs/sites add comments inline. Users just need to highlight some text, and hit on “comment inline” that is typically located in the right sidebar to bring up a comment post-popup to finally post their views. Besides the obvious reasons, this functionality can come in really handy for readers when they are done reading a long and winding post, and want to comment about a specific point in the post.
Genius of the apps is that it works flawlessly in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. And all that is required from your end is insertion of a single line of javascript code in your blog template(insert it in the sidebar.php, not header.php). Since code insert is small and heavy lifting occurs after the page loads, there is no real slow down in page load times on my blog as of now. There are couple of technical requirements about how your blog template is setup before the comments would work since the posts need to inside a <div> tag. Still for majority of the platforms including Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger it should work perfectly. As for moderation of comments posted on your site, you can do that via the MyBuzz tab at LineBuzz. Besides that, LineBuzz even keeps track of the comments you leave on other blogs.
The fact that I like the most about LineBuzz is that it can potentially run free of human spam(for bots it has CAPTCHA) that has affected MyBlogLog, Twitter, Technorati Favs. Not all, but majority of people on these apps are bent on making their network bigger by being buddy exchangers. A dumb idea I would say. However over at LineBuzz, I think any blogger would love to keep just the serious comments, while deleting the ones from link/buddy baiters.
LineBuzz is currently in alpha mode and getting ready for official launch sometime soon. Hey Mark@LineBuzz, doesn’t that mean we still have time to get few suggestions in? Eitherway here are few from my side - First - it would be great if LineBuzz comments get posted to the actual posts, or show below the regular comments for a blog post. Second - Need RSS feed for comments instead of email alerts. Third - inline button for deletion of spam comments(just like MyBlogLog has). Fourth - ability to modify css for the comments widget in sidebar. Fifth - a “Comment Inline” button that can be placed on the top of sidebar that will free up the comments widget to placed anywhere on the page.
On the whole a great piece of functionality for free. LineBuzz widget is installed and working at my blog. Serious commenters feel free to try it out.
Links:
LineBuzz
