Order of the Bath

I noticed that when I signed up for WordPress.com to get the required credentials for Akismet, one of the things you could put on your profile was a Jabber Id and it reminded me that the gospel is slowly spreading but needs a lot more impetus. This quote succinctly explains the situation which currently exists

I know a lot of friends who have Hotmail accounts. I also know a lot of friends who have GMail accounts. I personally don’t use either, I have my own email server at deepdarc.com. Do I need to have an account on Hotmail in order to email my friends who use Hotmail, or a GMail account to email my friends who use GMail? Of course not—that would be absurd. Yet, that is exactly the situation we tolerate with respect to Instant Messaging.

Read the rest of the excellent review of Jabber IM at deepdarc.

Afternote: When entering this post it wouldn’t let me put in an xmpp: protocol link—more work needed there I think. My Jabber ID is on my home page if you need to know.

I 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.