Last month, I told you that Gawker is now going to let commenters give posts new headlines and even write new introductions to the work of their staff writers. Now Quartz, which is kind of like an actually useful and informative BuzzFeed, is trying another tack with comments: They're putting them in the margins of the articles. AdWeek's David Taintor explains:

Atlantic Media's 10-month-old business publication on Tuesday introduced a new feature that lets readers weigh in on—and publish comments right next to—individual paragraphs within articles rather than in a separate section relegated to the bottom of the page.

"The gist of it is to try to foster more productive and interesting and a higher standard of commenting on the kind of content we do," said publisher Jay Lauf.

This is an interesting idea, treating comments like a pointed marginalia that lives inside and responds to the text. And it's another step away from what has become the traditional blog view—a vertical block of text on top with comments floating below. I'm not in love with the gutter of text that is the modern blog, but I'm not sure that this is the solution to the problem either. Below is a screenshot of what the system looks like. Click to enlarge:

Note the corporate sponsorship, which maybe is the real impetus behind the new system. But this marginalia comment thread idea also, in some ways, diminishes the comments; they only appear when your mouse hovers over and clicks on the appointed spot. Still, there's clearly some kind of a call in the air to change the commenter/blogger dynamic, and there are lots of different ways to go about changing that dynamic. What do you think?