The folks at Happy Cog recently rolled out a new (and quite stunning) company blog called Cognition. Founder and Executive Creative Director Jeffrey Zeldman published the first post explaining not only the rationale for the company blog in general, but their experiment with commenting on the blog, done either through a commenter's Twitter account or the commenter's own blog:

Speaking of experiments, there’s our comments section. Everybody knows inline blog comments are going the way of the BBS and Gopher sites of yore. We’re not ready to say “comments are dead” (we’ll leave that for Wired Magazine’s next cover story) but we have noticed the smell, and we’re doing something about it.

Kids today are more likely to respond to a blog post on Twitter than in the article’s comments section; so we’ve collocated our comments on Twitter. Share a tweet-length response here, and, with your permission, it will go there. If you are moved to respond with more than 140 characters, post the response on your website, and it will show up here. Clever, these Americans.

So, comments are done either via Twitter or through your own blog. Want to comment through Twitter? Compose your tweet on the Cognition post's page and submit. Want to submit one of your own blog posts as a comment? Go write and publish that post, then come back to the Cognition post's page and submit your post's URL.

I have to say, I really like the idea of putting a textarea on the post page so readers can tweet a message. After reading the article, I can tweet a comment immediately, and send it to my Twitter feed, without having to go to Twitter.com, or open TweetDeck, or copy/paste the URL. But looking at the very first post on Cognition, there are over 350 responses, and a cursory glance over all of them indicates they're all from Twitter. It is a first post, and a pretty big announcement, so this is probably expected. But I agree a lot with Jeff Croft, who in a comment on Airbag argued that this approach possibly adds unnecessary noise to Twitter (already pretty noisy). Croft suggests (and I agree) the tweeted comment should be an @reply (to @happycog perhaps, since @cognition is taken by someone else!) so only your followers who are following that Twitter account see the post. There's a question of audience here: By posting comments through Twitter, my comment is sent to all my followers. Which raises a question about who I should write the comment for, Cognition's post author, or my twitter followers?

I also like the idea of providing a spot to input a specific URL to a blog posts I've written as a response. It's a little more deliberate than relying on a linkback system. There only seem to be a handful of these kinds of comments on Cognition's first post, however, and those do get lost in all the other Twitter comments. I would value these comments much more, since they supposedly took a bit more time and effort to compose, and this is where I think good, meaningful, productive conversation and feedback would take place.

Of course, it seems both of these solutions have been, or can be, implemented on your blog now. There are several plugins for WordPress, for example, to collect "tweetbacks" to your blog posts. And much more established is the concept of linkbacks from one blog post to another. It seems the major difference between these solutions and the implementation on Cognition is that the reader explicitly has to write her/his tweet or add his/her post link through Cognition's site.

One major problem I see with comments on Congnition, in either tweet or blog form, is the complete lack of a permalink back to the original tweet or blog post. Links to a comment author's website have become pretty standard in commenting systems. Plus, comments have served to build community and readership. There is almost a gift culture with blog commenting, where regularly commenting on a blog encourages the blog author and other blog readers to check out your own site, and comment on your posts as well. Having no permalinks back to tweets or comment posts effectively negates this culture. Not sure if this is a feature or a bug, but I'm curious to know!

My comments are a sloppy mess, and I am inspired by Cognition's approach to rethink commenting here, and to reconsider how I comment elsewhere. I'm definitely curious to see how their experiment evolves, and I hope it does evolve, because I think there are plenty of opportunities to improve. The folks at Happy Cog have been very receptive to praise and criticism of their commenting solution, so it'll be fun to watch.