Blog Support - Provide commenting facility inside loco.ubuntu.com

[Jono Bacon]

Much of the inspiration for the work behind the blogging functionality in loco.ubuntu.com was to provide (a) better visibility on the work going on the community and (b) to grow a community of onlookers who can comment on this work. While the current iteration provides wonderful visibility on this work, I believe that the commenting piece is critical for building the community piece.

I believe the desirable functionality would be:

 * User goes to loco.ubuntu.com and sees a stack of blog entries outlining great work going on. These entries are aggregated from blogs.
 * User can click on an article and it has a permalink on loco.ubuntu.com and the ability for users to submit comments (preferably displayed in a threaded way).

This functionality is exactly what we do with cloud.ubuntu.com and it is working well.

The specific commenting infrastructure is less interesting to me, although I prefer disqus, but I think using a drupal commenting facility would be fine.

One concern may be - "surely the comments should be left on the original blog?". I disagree with this - I think if comments are on the original blog we will see the commenting community fragmented across the different blogs - I think it makes better sense to keep the community together in a centralized place (in the same way they could arguably just bookmark all the different LoCo blogs, but l.u.c brings the blogs together into a central place).

I believe that having this commenting system will (a) provide an added motivation for LoCo team members to blog about their work ad see the kudos from the community and (b) help grow a community of LoCo discussion and ideas in loco.ubuntu.com.