trying to branch this conversation out from twitter to branch. i can't figure out how to get all the tweets and replies that are already in this convo from twitter into here

@Nick - i love the intent and progress of what your doing with Gawker.

@Fred - what AVC has done, i think, is proven that the comments section can be as important as the post itself. it teaches the readers, fans and followers of yours that stopping the read at the start of comments misses 60% of what's in your head on the topic.

an example - when i saw the brewster launch i wondered again if i had to leave android and get on iphone and wondered if that had made you switch. and i *loved* reading that this was a matter or principle for you, that switching for brewster would be a compromise of ethics somehow. its lovely and i felt it too.

at huffpost when we were really moving forward we started to highlight visually if a blogger/author/editor was in the comments replying but we had a lot more to do - that has to be signalled in the article body itself because readers have been trained that the comment section is either a) abysmal or b) interesting to only fanatics of the site.

embeddable branches with invites, dynamically created from twitter conversations and discuss threads etc might be an awesome way to move that incredible content into the forefront so its not just insiders who get it. right now insiders get it that AVC is a critical read, but the real insiders get it that the comments are where you get more fred :)

I think a critical tipping point is when the commenting turns into a discussion, and then the conversations are driven by the community itself. The relationship with the author is key. Not all authors can do that what Fred is doing, I think.

@paul Why do you think readers are trained to think less about the comment sections? It certainly looks that way when the comment stream appears like no one is having a conversation, rather they are shouting at each other. Maybe the word "commenting" demeans the purpose of having a discussion. A comment is like a hit and run. A conversation is a give and take.