Excellent points. Fortunately, Commentpress does organize comments by author, section, and general comments (link). It is all housed in a page, so there may even be a way to to get your comments fed out via RSS. This would ultimately make this fit the social dynamic you suggest, and I think it could be done. In the short run, however, Commentpress appeals to me because you can publish, annotate, comment, and share ideas all in one space. The issue of keeping and tracking your comments has always been a bane of the blogosphere, and until OpenID is accepted more broadly -we might struggle through these problems for a bit longer. Nonetheless, Commentpress is a good first step for publishing public domain works in a potentially pre-existing social network of a WPMu environment -yet allowing chapters, particular poems, etc. individual rss feeds so that they can be consumed elsewhere -be it a faculty course blog, a student space, or another university site that can handle RSS. The biggest advantage for me is that so many important works of, say North and South American colonial history, will be RSS ready and can be consumed by a host of other folks how want to do something with these texts. How cool would it be to have an aggregator function taking what people have publish around the web from the public domain and making it available to your community and beyond? Pretty sick potential here, making it much more than an annotation tool in that it presents the information quite differently.

That’s not meant to discredit it as an annotation technology, only to point out that it is one that is not very much a social software and very content-centric. If annotation is something you are interested in as a potential pedagogical activity, there are *lots* of new ways to do it, some of which, like trailfire, fleck or wikalong, that by locating part of the functionality either on the client-side or on a central (non-text specific) server hold more promise for doing both annotation *and* more social functions like ad hoc group formation.

Anyways, it is interesting stuff and commentpress is definitely a useful arrow to have in the quiver.

Martha has been pushing in that direction with the library and it makes perfect sense. A publishing platform that they can help organize and control. What’s even sweeter about Commentpress is that everything is published as a post, making the texts all searchable by chapter, section, etc. Not to mention rss, commenting, feeding from the students own blog, etc. It makes total sense and is definitely doable.