The days of traditional post-blog messages are soon coming to an end. If you believe some of the hype about Genius, that is.

The US-based start-up allows readers to highlight and annotate the text in any HTML webpage, and send the marked-up version to Genius for all to see. To content creators this might sound terrifying. Although content posted online has always been subject to scrutiny by your readership, the nature of comments sections normally means it is hard to follow the back and forth of critical analysis.

At first glance, Genius makes it far easier to have your content picked apart (or praised, for that matter). Take this example from the New York Times (courtesy of Gigaom):

The news gets worse for those posting low-quality content on their sites. Because pages are hosted off-site on Genius, there is little site owners can do to moderate or bury less favourable comments. And the fact that users go to the trouble to posting to Genius also means very little spam features in the site.

So a comments section over which site owners have scant control, makes comments easier to view, and that is virtually free of reader-repelling spam? To many that may sound terrifying. Yet those who create quality content must surely welcome the opportunity for debate and, above all else, praise.