Happy Cog has a blog (tee tum tee tum tee tum) and, unsurprisingly, it’s imaginative, well–written and good looking (and no doubt has a GSOH to boot). It also has an interesting comments system:
The Cognition comment form: Your comment has to be posted to Twitter as well
If you want to respond to a post you either tweet or write something on your own blog (natch), which Cognition will dutifully link to. It’s smart and beautifully implemented.
There’s a major advantage over your typical comments system, of course, in that commentators can’t hide behind a CB radio–like handle, which means (in theory) less trolling and aggression. Comments also have to be to the (140 character) point, or a (considered) blog post.
So what’s not to like? Well, as Chris points out, there’s no actual conversation here, and I can’t see the system fostering a real conversation in the future. A long list of tweets merely indicates how popular the post (or, more likely, the author) is. I know Zeldman is good at what he does, and I know Happy Cog are good too. Ho hum. It’s not much more helpful than Tumblr’s Dave liked this system:
A tumblog comments list: Ho hum.
By not keeping comments on site Cognition is depriving readers of asides, clarifications and expansions on the original point and the chance to get involved in a discussion — what happens if you want to reply to a response rather than the post itself (or what if you don’t have a Twitter account)? Of course, hundreds of comments generate their own problems, but I’ve yet to come across a system that solves them. Sure, it’s useful to get an idea of how popular a post is, but a simple tweet count suffices.
It seems to me the only way to foster a conversation on a popular blog is to establish a clear set of rules (the first of which is use your real name) and moderate comments, or at least make users set up an account before they can add a comment. It can be done, I think; see Drawar for an example.