Regular readers know that I am constantly trying to find ways to let CCLaP's community of visitors communicate directly with each other, a group endeavor I like to call "building the CCLAPocracy;" but that it's difficult for me sometimes, in that I'm highly critical of most of the current technology out there for managing and maintaining these online communities, and think that their very setups sometimes lead to these endless, vicious "flame wars" between "trolls" that are always seeming to pop up. For example, I don't like the anonymity that comes with most traditional commenting systems at blogs, and think that it directly leads to some of this outrageous cruelty that you see between people sometimes online.

So how nice, then, that popular social network Facebook started offering an extremely easy-to-use widget for their service this week, which in under ten minutes (if you know what you're doing) lets you add a whole new standalone commenting system to your blog, run through Facebook itself and requiring members to log in first. That way it keeps anonymity down to a minimum, since Facebook members are required to go by their real names there; but it also provides a way to directly leave traditional comments at the end of every permalinked blog entry here, rather than the decentralized experiment I've been trying with third-party service ShoutEm.com (which hasn't been very popular at all -- not a single person besides myself has used it yet).

Even better, there's an option so that you can repost your CCLaP comment over at your own Facebook profile if you'd like (in your "Wall" section); and then just like every other comment there, you can choose to receive an email whenever someone responds to it, letting you easily follow along with the conversation using a system you're already at every day anyway. That after all is the ultimate selling point to such a system -- that there are currently 185 million members of Facebook (and growing by millions a week), almost 100 million of which log into their accounts every single day. I'm hoping such popularity will lead to a higher adoption rate of it here, versus the experiments I've tried in the past; because really, I actually do want to encourage the building a legitimate community here!

Anyway, if you're on the front page of the site while reading this (or seeing it through the RSS feed), I encourage you to click over to the archived version of the entry and to leave a comment, if you happen to be a FB member. I look forward to seeing what the results of this latest experiment will be.