Optimising your comments – Avatars / Gravatars
Following on from yesterdays post on optimising your comments using email today I’d like to examine the benefits or otherwise of adding avatars / gravatars to your comments (and posting work) and ask the question of whether they should be introduced here at blogsavvy?
Avatars are nothing new. In fact I recently had the pleasure of hanging out with an absolute pioneer in the use of Avatars in blogging, Sebastian Fiedler (click on the link to his site to see what I mean!). He’s been using avatars for commentary on other bloggers posts, categorisation and more since 2002 and is an excellent model to examine when looking at this kind of thing.
Particularly interesting of late, however, is the introduction of Gravatars, associated plugins for blogging tools and the increasing use of avatars not just for recognition of other bloggers but also in comments fields.
The idea is pretty simple, register and post an image to the Gravatar site, install a plugin on your blog and then you’ll both get your own avatar displayed when you comment and, if you’re commentators have a gravatar, theirs will be appear too. You can even install a simple Gravatar signup option to encourage them to get one or set the plugin to allow users to set their own gravatar for your site.
So, to paraphrase enormously Skippy and Chris on the subject it’s pretty straightforward to see that adding these images assists with the development of identity and hence of community and in that grabs back something of the anonymity and issues with which the web sufferers. For educationalists it’s a very significant component to be considered in developing a community of inquiry and is almost makes it worth considering tools like LiveJournal and Elgg for that facility alone.
However, the enormous problem / block here is that Gravatars are third party. That is, if their site breaks / they decide to introduce ads / they go evil and nasty or more… then the whole thing breaks. Skippy’s plugin helps with this enormously by caching gravatars and allowing users to select particular gravatars for particular sites but the question remains as to whether it’s possible to develop a system which doesn’t rely on a third party provider. For example, a gravatars.jpg file on your base URL which could be auto pulled in (and styled) with the link to your blog, I imagine that’d be much more fitting to a concept of digital identity?
So, for these concerns and also for a desire to keep thing simple early on with blogsavvy I haven’t installed any gravatar tools… do you think it would improve the use of this sites (or yours) comments form?
- Posted on: June 15th, 2005
- 10 Comments
- Category: Archives
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I had gravatars installed on my journal comments for about a week before pulling them. Trying to pull the images off-site put too much of a load on my site (at least for my 56k dialup). Removing them from my template has renewed the speed of my layout’s generation.
It was also annoying to be one of the few (at least on my blog) who caught on to the gravatar bit. A lot of people were just stuck with the standard image because they didn’t know/weren’t interested in participating with it.
I think it’s a good sign that people are thinking of methods to do things like this, but I don’t think this is the way to do it. I keep getting the feeling that something could be done with Greasemonkey to accomplish similar things, but I don’t know enough about it to be sure, and even then that would limit the feature (for now) to Firefox browsers.
I saw a PHP script a while back that checked for a favicon from the site of the person making the comment – if it found one it would show that next to the comment – seemed like quite a neat idea, although of course this depended on them having a favicon on their site in the first place and i think probably used their bandwidth too. Gets round the third party issue though.
If i can find the link i’ll post it so you can see an example.
One of the issues solved by using a private hosting service is content filtering. If you think letting random people post whatever text they like in their comments can sometimes prove to be a bad idea, imagine now that they can post pornographic or violent images. I’m no prude, but I don’t want that on my site. I would, however, like to move to an open source format or standard so that if Gravatar goes belly up, people can just open up a similar service using freely available code. Another option is to leave all moderation up to each site. The images could be cached, and on login, if there are new avatars to be approved, they could all be shown on one page in a large grid. The human brain can process images very quickly, so even a page of 20 images could be quickly scanned for appropriateness. This could work similar to the “Admin must approve first comment from each e-mail address” option, or even be integrated with it.
Thanks for the comments guys, it’s an interesting one for sure.
I’m not that worried about the control issue Mark… people could call themselves all sorts of stuff in my comments field and I’ll just boot ‘em out. Same deal here really. A culture of forgiveness rather than permission
That script sounds fantastic Rob… although every favicon I’ve done so far has been absolutely rubbish and this sites one would probably be BS
Am worried about page loading too… but if I work on only getting 10 odd comments per post that shouldn’t be *too* bad… the problem is when Gravatar bungs up and won’t load / slows done. Similar problem that I’ve had with Bloglines.
james[at]blogsavvy(dot)net if you have a minute (I’m no coder but I’d enjoy playing with it!)
James,
I saw the original article here: http://www.picment.com/articles/asp/pingfavicon/ – the code is in asp, but in the comments someone posted a php version (unfortunately, I cannot seem to get on the comments page for some reason though).
A quick Google search comes up with this: http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=4917&p=2 which although related to TextPattern also has some PHP which could be used – I’ll try this out later and see what I can come up with.
Favicons are cool but I too find it difficult to come up with good ones – so little space! But it can be done: http://mppierce66.home.comcast.net/web/fi/
Rob
Thanks for the links Rob… especially the gallery, you’re a legend!
Expect to see on of them hovering over this blog asap :O)
For those interested in the favicon (favatar) plugin, I ran a search on Google and found it.
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/favatars and details at http://www.noscope.com/journal/2004/12/favatars
Brilliant, thanks Lelia!
Anyone know whether the Gravatars plugin can be safely installed with WordPress 2.0 and K2 and if so whihc CSS file has to be modified to get it working?
Thanks!
(Ironic that Gravatars aren’t enabled on this site!)
[...] d you like to add (gr)avatars to your posts or to consider whether it would be worthwhile? I’ve posted a run-down / consideration of the benefits / negatives and ways of [...]