Comment is King

Submit the URL to a blog post and browse the broader conversation.

Authors

Jason Brownlee and Matt Milosavljevic from the mayhem method team.

History

CommentIsKing was developed primarily by Jason Brownlee and Matt Milosavljevic of mayhem method in September 2008. It was launched at then end of September 2008 on the domain commentisking.com and remained active until late 2008 when it was decommissioned. In August 2009, the stakeholders in the project agreed to make the source code and assets open source under the MIT License on github.

Detail

The conversation has left the blogsphere, meaning that increasing the conversations regarding online content are occurring offsite. Comment is King is an online tool for blog authors and other content producers for finding and participating in the broader conversations around their content from disparate services such as Reddit, Digg, Delicious, FriendFeed, and Twitter.

Content producers currently resort to ad hoc searches, alerts, and generally manually tracking broader conversations around their content across the web. The core competitive advantage is the automation of the process to consolidate relevant broader conversations from high-profile services across the web into a single comment stream.

Each ‘conversation’ page is created as needed, and the databsase is only used to track what users are submitting to the website. Obvious extensions include the integration of additional conversation sources.

Up and Running

1. Acquire a copy of the codebase (download or clone the git repository)
2. Install project gems (rake gems:install) then create (rake db:create) and initialize (rake db:migrate) the mysql database
3. Start the web application (script/server)
4. Access the web application via http://localhost:3000

Technology

The application was developed using Ruby on Rails 2.1.1 and an array of plug-ins (installed) and gems. Also ensure you have the rspec and json gems installed. The other gems required by the project (installed via: rake gems:install) include need, hpricot, twitter, diggr, friend-feed, and feed-normalizer.

The reddit and open flash chart lazy plugins were modified for use in the application.

Amazingly all the API integration still seems to work after a year since this web app was built.

Screenshots

Landing Page:

Example Conversation Page:

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright © 2008-2009, Jason Brownlee and Matt Milosavljevic

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.