In a potentially significant evolution in blogging architecture, the Institute for the Future of the Book has released CommentPress 1.0, a WordPress theme. This innovation might well help drive the software infrastructure necessary to produce long-form documents through interactive authoring and editing.
As Ben Vershbow of the Institute describes:
This little tool is the happy byproduct of a year and a half spent hacking WordPress to see whether a popular net-native publishing form, the blog, which, most would agree, is very good at covering the present moment in pithy, conversational bursts but lousy at handling larger, slow-developing works requiring more than chronological organization — whether this form might be refashioned to enable social interaction around long-form texts. Out of this emerged a series of publishing experiments loosely grouped under the heading “networked books.” …
Ben closes with some thoughts on future needs –
An important last thought … . While CommentPress presents exciting possibilities for social reading and writing on the Web, it is still very much bound by its technical origins, the blog. This presents significant limitations both in the flexibility of document structures and in the range of media that can be employed in writing and response. Sure, even in the current, ultra-basic version, there’s no reason a CommentPress document can’t incorporate image, video and sound embeds, but they must be fit into the narrow and brittle textual template dictated by the blog.
Take a look!