The Evolving Newsroom

Patrick Thornton has reviewed the Washington Post’s new visual ‘WebCom’ commenting system on Poynter online.

It’s not being used site-wide, only on “Flash-based video features such as onBeing and Scene In.”

[Steven] King [the site's editor of innovations] said the site will start using WebCom on other videos later this year. There are no plans to use it for articles and other text content.

WebCom displays comments in a dynamic web instead of a traditional list. As new comments come in, the web gets bigger. The web, however, is not organized by chronology. King and his team believe that the most valuable comments are those that are rated highly by peers and those that spur responses. WebCom uses those criteria to organize the web.

The web changes as users post new comments, as discussions develop and as users vote on the quality of comments. Comments that spur responses gravitate to the center of the web. Those rated highest by fellow users appear larger, while those with low ratings appear very small. And comments that are well-liked and garner a lot of responses are both larger and closer to the center. Comments are color-coded to help returning users see what’s new.

This visual metaphor should make it easier for people to jump into developed comment threads, and King hopes that it will lead to more and better discussions.

I didn’t spend a huge amount of time checking this out – the first few video stories I looked at had few or no comments – so haven’t got a feel for how useful it is. But an interesting idea.