You know what bugs me? Having to keep track of comments manually. I’m a gregarious kinda gal, so if I read something that I have something to say about, I say it. If there are comments open, then that’ll be my medium of choice. But if I read a bunch of interesting things one day and as a result make a bunch of comments, keeping track of the conversation after that can be a bit difficult!
What I would love is something like Flickr‘s “Comments You’ve Made” page. This show’s you all the photos you’ve commented on, as well as pulling in responses since you last said something. The big advantage is that you can go to one place to follow all the conversations and you also only need to revisit the original page if you particularly want to say something else.
I’ve often wondered why blog comments weren’t anywhere near as “sticky” as forums, emails lists and so on always were. I think a massive part of it is because of the distributed content, it’s much more difficult to keep up with what’s being said. The net effect is less participation, which isn’t much good for anyone.
Comments (2) Permalink
October 19th, 2005 at 5:04 PM
Words can’t say how much I agree. Well actually, they can because I blogged it back in April.
As best I can tell, the available options are:
‘Subscribe by Email’ – which some blogs have
‘Reverse pingback’ which is a made up technology, but fairly self explanatory concept. Trouble is, it would generate a *huge* about of traffic over the net.
RSS comment feeds for specific posts
It can’t be hard to generate comment feeds per post on the fly, and it would fit into existing feed reader tools (though might require RSS readers to learn to cope with many more subscriptions).
Subscribe by email works fine too, but it’s nicer to have blog reading separate from email reading, since it destroys my productivity if I do both at once. Ahem.
The problem with all these is that you need every single CMS on the planet to implement it and every blogger to update their software. I don’t know how to work around that.
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:39 AM
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