Interesting ideas about commenting from Dave Winer.  My comments below

an idea that comments could work quite a bit differently and remove the incentives to replay old arguments, and keep the comments focused on the ideas being responded to.

1. A fixed commenting period for each post of 24 hours.

nope,  don’t like this one,  merely because I don’t want to expect everyone who might be reading my post to see it on that particular day.

2. Until the period expires, none of the comments would be visible to other commenters. (But they would be visible to the author of the post, in case a commenter spots a typo or a factual error, or has an answer to a question that’s posed by the piece.)

While it might be a good idea in a world where everyone has all the best tools for integrating/linking  their blog posts to other blog posts (like the mostly defunct or unused trackbacks,  which I loved),  I prefer to let people bounce off other’s ideas.  I see the aim here, though.  It cuts down on flaming between people who are ,  for the most part,  trolls (or one troll jumping on the comments of a legitimate commenter).

3. You could edit and refine your comments during the period.

This seems to me to remove the authenticity of a stream.  Later comments lose their original  references if comments are edited

4. There would be a length limit of 1000 characters to keep people from using comments in place of a blog post. No one is going to read a blog post in a comment. (Many people don’t read the blog posts they’re commenting on either. 🙁

I could go either way, but lean toward Dave on this one.

5. After the commenting period is over, the comments would become visible, and no further comments would be permitted.

Again, aimed at the prevention of flame wars, but it seems that , at least for low to moderate activity blogs (as far as comments go) like mine, I could more easily moderate this myself .

Scripting News: Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system

I appreciate Dave’s commitment to thinking about how to make the blogosphere a more civil place.  I would much prefer applying all these suggestions to what most organizational comment spaces do:  NOTHING.  There is no organizational presence whatsoever, and trolls rule (I see this in church “community” sections on web sites.   I’ve heard consultants tell church organizations this;  that they’ve “left this space to its own devices” (referring to a “discussion” tab on a Facebook page for the organization).  That advice was ignored.  Discussions continue to spiral into flaming,  driving out good comments and leaving the trolls to dominate and stick  around ,  picking at the remains like scavengers.

It seems that these proposals are more important on higher traffic and commented sites than mine.  But as I described above,  it is the  larger sites that tend to neglect such things,  and give rarely a thought to the issues of what makes for good web conversation and debate,   even though these suggestions are merely a matter of setting up system processes, and can be coded once and then  turned loose.   I always say,  there’s time for things that are REALLY priorities.  And church organizations are rarely good at it.