Back in August there was a whole conversation in my part of the web about blog comments . It was nice and lively.
Lately there’s been a bunch of talk in my feeds about a particular kind of comment system: guestbooks. What’ interesting is that it isn’t a conversation. As far as I can see it’s just synchronicity of a couple of people all mentioning it at the same time. Sometimes things are just funny like that. As an example, I had already started writing this post when I suddenly see Susam talking about re-adding a guestbook after a long hiatus.
I added a guestbook to my own site a few weeks ago, though no one seems to have noticed yet. Either that or it’s just broken (this is the problem with building things yourself). It’s a just a basic guestbook.
What I have enjoyed about the guestbook posts I’ve been seeing is all the possibilities beyond the basic that they have showed me.
I forget exactly how I came across, Eva’s site, but her guestbooks is a lovely upgrade to the usual format that makes it a board of sticky notes.
Annie Mueller recently had a post go viral and she mentioned her guestbook in her reaction to that. It lets you draw pictures! I think that’s really cool.
I want to do more with mine now. I’m not sure exactly what. I’m just excited to see all these other ideas. I know there’s even more that I haven’t seen. If you know about any cool things people are doing with their guestbooks or comment sections, please let me know so I can steal research them.