“Arbitrary Comments”

In the side­bar on the front page of this site there’s now some­thing called “Arbi­trary Com­ments,” or what might be called a “Shout­box” if I didn’t think “Shout­box” sounded so stu­pid. This is for com­ments that have no home, that aren’t in response to any par­tic­u­lar post. It’s a nice thing to have, but mostly I just wanted to see if I could do it using the stan­dard Word­Press frame­work with­out hav­ing to install a shit­tily writ­ten plu­gin that would crap out with the next upgrade.

All I did was cre­ate a “Page” (a tech­ni­cal Word­Press term) called Arbi­trary Com­ments, then, in the side­bar, call that page and load its com­ments with these sim­ple lines:

<?php query_posts('page_id=120'); ?>
<?php the_post(); ?>
<?php comments_template(); ?>

I also imple­mented a PHP trick from Lib­ertà to sort the retrieved com­ments in descend­ing order of cre­ation, as all good shout­boxes do.

Shout­boxes are an inter­est­ing new medium. And they really are new, I mean, noth­ing like them has ever really existed in the past. A com­ment in a shout­box is a mes­sage that is osten­si­bly addressed to the owner of the shout­box, but is inten­tion­ally pub­lic. The clos­est thing to this that I can think of are those dry erase boards peo­ple put on their doors in col­lege, with a pen hang­ing from them so that any­body walk­ing by could write some­thing. Bystanders aren’t exactly part of the audi­ence of the mes­sage, but there’s clearly some­thing more com­pelling to this than email or pri­vate messaging.

It’s cer­tainly one of the biggest draws of MySpace. Their com­ment­ing sys­tem makes every pro­file organic, alive, inter­ac­tive. Peo­ple attract com­ments more often than they update their pro­file them­selves, and that’s one of the main rea­sons to check people’s pro­files, which is about all you really do on MySpace. And there’s some­thing more friend-like in open­ing up your per­sonal page to the impulses of those peo­ple you’ve told MySpace are your “friends,” extend­ing trust in the mutual cre­ation of a page that is intended to define you.

I remem­ber try­ing out Vox a cou­ple months ago, which seems to mar­ket itself as some­thing like MySpace with a heav­ier focus on blog­ging. I thought it would be per­fect, but I soon real­ized that, at this point, unless your social net­work­ing site allows arbi­trary com­ments, you’re not using a social net­work­ing site — you’re using a blog­ging site with ten­u­ous lit­tle con­nec­tions between mem­bers. And nobody cares about your fuck­ing blog.