Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Jay would like to have video comments on his weblog. What he proposes is simply the ability to attach a video file when filling out the comments form on a website. The topic has been raised on the mailing list before. I've said it before, but I'll repeat myself here: I'm not a fan of this solution.

There are obvious concerns with a feature like this. They all come from the fact that all the videos will reside on the original poster's website. Problems include bandwidth usage, storage requirements, spam (on older entries mostly) and last but not least: Copyright (the poster becomes responsible since everything is on his website).

What bothers me though is that there already exist technology to handle video ‘comments’ — technology that doesn't have these issues. It's not hard to slap an upload field on a comments form, but there is no reason to create problems where there is none to begin with.

The existing technology is either TrackBacks or Pingbacks. While the two are similar Pingbacks might be more interesting in this regard because they can be applied directly to a video file (TrackBacks can only be applied to XHTML documents). What TrackBacks and Pingbacks do is to provide a way for an author to let someone else know that they are talking about them.

For example: At the same time as I posted this message I used TrackBack technology to send a message to Jay's server to let him know I'm talking about him. As a result a link to this post should now be located on Jay's blog entry. Making references like this is a very important thing when trying to create a complete hypertext-map of subject. You can call it external commenting if you'd like. It's a fundemental part of a good hypertext structure.

So instead of collecting all the videos on the poster's website I would much prefer to have the ‘comments’ distributed on the commentee's own website. You won't run into the same bandwidth and storage trouble as every speaker in the conversation shares the bandwidth/storage. Spam is much less attractive since the spammer would be hosting their own video file — any income for the spammer would quickly be eaten up by their bandwidth costs. Copyright is less of a problem since everyone is responsible for what they contribute to the conversation. Legislation varies from country to country so it's impossible to say anything definite — you do have a much better case if you're not hosting the video yourself.

After any TrackBacks/Pingbacks has been recorded it would be simple to display these on the website based when they were recorded. That is after all how things already work. If more than one person links to Jay's entry the two or more TrackBacks would be displayed in chronological (or reverse chronological) order below Jay's post, creating the ‘conversation’ Jay wants.

Now I know what Jay will say. He will want a playlist so he can play all the videos in a linear, movie-like fashion. While this may be positive with some conversations it most likely would be pretty bad in most. This comes from taking a hypertext/media structure and trying to play it as one linear sequence. This isn't a problem if there is one main post and all comments are on this post, but this isn't a movie, it's the internet. What you will most likely have is person A creating a video that is commented on by B, C and D. D will also comment on E. E and F will comment on B and finally G will comment on F and A. You don't make an automated playlist of that. Instead you let the user (the reader) make their own navigation through the conversation, just like you navigate through webpages to create your own story.

If you want to make a linear movie, or a linear conversation you can do that of course. And if that's what you want you would be much better off with an upload field on your own website. But at the same time you would be throwing away all the advantages of the internet's hypertext structure. To me the advantages of a distributed comment system like TrackBacks/Pingbacks by far outweigh the advantages of a linear comment thread.

I probably have more to say on this topic, but I will stop now. This entry is much longer than I intended already.

PS. It is very ironic that I should write an entry about TrackBacks and Pingbacks when my own blog doesn't support either. Currently I can only send TrackBacks to other websites, but I neither recieve TrackBacks nor send or recieve Pingbacks. I am however working on it, and all should be possible by this time tomorrow (I hope).