Tracking commentsI will quote another blogger (AR) here because it is an important insight. Unfortunately he is on an internal blog on our company system so not otherwise accessible
One of my main beefs with blogging, for like, oh, forever now is that there isn’t really a good way to track comments. When I post a comment on someone’s blog, I don’t want to have to repeatedly check that blog to see if anyone responded to my comment. Some blogs have evolved to support RSS feeds for all of the comments, or for the comments on a particular post. But I don’t like this idea either, mainly because I don’t want to have to manage a whole series of comment RSS feeds in my RSS reader.
An idea AR is experimenting with is to use a second instance of the Planet aggregator to collect all the comments to blogs on the Company Planet but this is not entirely satisfactory because it isolates the comments from their context (the original post) and also from other comments if the thread takes off with a life of its own.
Doing it the hard way, I have discovered the same thing. I subscribe to the comments feed of some of my favourite blogs but what I get is a random selection of remarks unrelated to their predecessors and the original context. This is not so bad in the early life of a post because you can usually remember what has gone recently before but getting a “me too, but such-and-such” to a post that is a week or more old is just meaningless static using this method. I also get comments to posts which had no interest for me in the first place.
IMHO a good start would be some sort of dynamic feed which generates entries to the comment stream of a post iff I have commented previously in the thread. Another approach I am thinking of is a method that automatically subscribes to the comment stream of an individual post as I make a comment. It would need to eliminate duplicates but also would need a configurable time-out so that old streams drop off either after a time lapse or perhaps if they go dormant for a period.
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