A few design-related items that hang together:

— The ace web-designer Jason Santa Maria writes about the messy way sites display their comments. (This one included.)

Authors spend a good chunk of time and attention writing articles, but so little attention is given to the conversation that happens afterward. Most of the time readers are left to fend for themselves in a comment wasteland. As the comment count soars into the tens and hundreds for an article on a popular news or personal website, the chances of anyone reading both an article and the comments that follow before contributing plummet. This doesn’t stop people from commenting, but after a certain point, most people appear to be commenting blindly.

He suggests making highlighting the best comments part of a community manager’s responsibility and shows an example of his idea. As you might expect, the comments on his post are good — even if there are a lot of them.

— The NYT writes about a new way to target users with specially designed versions of a display ad, on the fly.

— The excellent design resource Smashing Magazine has a thorough writeup on the issues around how to integrate ads into the overall design of a site. Some interesting insights into ad placement on site home pages versus individual story pages. (Along those lines, the new ESPN.com apparently has fewer slots for ads.)