First, my apologies. It appears as though all your confusion about disappearing comments was because I have enabled some spam protection. I have it set up so that any comment with a link in it is held for moderation. (It used to be “hold any comment with two links,” but spam was still getting through that way.) What I need to do is post a warning about that, just as I posted a warning about comments being unrestricted.

I don’t think I’ll edit your comments together, though, because I think it’s just another one of those little things that illustrates, quite nicely, how different a blog is from a book.

I like your ideas; they’re mostly in line with my own thinking. Re: Editorial boxes. I was thinking the same thing, but I’ll probably do it in the footnote format, instead. I hope that will be an elegant solution — something that will use editorial comments without breaking the reader’s flow.

I haven’t thought much about the internal links. The Choose Your Own Adventure idea is kind of interesting, and now I’m starting to regret editing out all the Trackbacks in my comments. Hmmm… could also be a lot of work. I’d have to find a way to establish the reference pointers so that, as page numbers change throughout the editing process, they dynamically update.

I’m not sold (yet) on the idea of leaving the hyperlinks blue. Something tells me that would be distracting in a book format. An itch you can’t scratch. May be better to remove them entirely. I played with the idea of making a Word macro that creates an appendix of hyperlinks for the book. Something like:

Find Hyperlink
Copy Hyperlink
Remove Hyperlink
Insert footnote
Go to end of document
Create matching footnote
Paste URL

I hit a brick wall when my Visual Basic skills (or lack thereof) slapped me upside the head. Will probably give it another go before the whole project is over — I’d like to see how that would look (and read).

Re: the Tag Cloud. Interesting idea. I could see finding a place for that. Any idea how to create one? There’s got to be a tool out there that will let you customize the process so that common words like “THE” don’t appear. More work.

Finally, I like the idea of an online version of the book. No reason why I can’t make an eBook, with links, simply by exporting the final Word .doc to .pdf!

Hope it works..

- Insert editorial boxes for commentary and updates. Like this.

- Leave the links blue and underlined then create a website version of the book. People can go there and click on links if they’re interested.

- Update internal references. (see page 6)

- I’d like to see a tag cloud as cover art or an intro page so people know what the book is (mostly) about.

Like this

For internal links you might use a choose your own adventure format… (see page 6)

I think leaving the links blue and underlined is a good idea. When you get done you can make a website version of the book with actual links and people can go there if they want to click on them.