I value writing for similar reasons offered by the article, and I am very much invested in note taking methodology.
I never thought of commenting as a way of note-taking. However, it makes a lot of sense to use one’s comment history as a way of looking back. It’s actually very contextualized.
I was never someone to comment much, because I thought there was no value for other people in what I have to say. Alas, looking at it as a note-taking endeavor should definitely have insightful returns.
> I was never someone to comment much, because I thought there was no value for other people in what I have to say.
I think this as well: if my thoughts are already well represented in other comments, or in popular/common thought in general, what's the point of repeating it? And if it's not popular/common, it's a lot of effort to articulate in a way that has a good chance of not being dismissed, and could even be inflammatory.
And still, there's 1) an interesting parallel with art/creation, and 2) something missing in the web toolkit for people.
1) when you (want to) create something (whatever the discipline), it seems that everyone faces this dread that what they are doing is either not popular, or just too common and used, so what's the point in creating/doing it?
When it might still be essential to do it first for oneself, because the prize is in the practice itself, not the by-product that is the result. Writing is thinking, so are
2) the idea of comments trail as a thought archive is good! I wish there was an integrated way (as integrated as "View Source") in browsers not only to comment (so publicly write something) about web documents or elements, but to annotate them - for private use first, with the option of making them public on a personal site (yes, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation but...)
I value writing for similar reasons offered by the article, and I am very much invested in note taking methodology.
I never thought of commenting as a way of note-taking. However, it makes a lot of sense to use one’s comment history as a way of looking back. It’s actually very contextualized.
I was never someone to comment much, because I thought there was no value for other people in what I have to say. Alas, looking at it as a note-taking endeavor should definitely have insightful returns.