Recently, I’ve been talking about blogs to non-bloggers to get them interested in blogging. One of the points I make to these folks is that the value of blogs lies in building unofficial networks of people, not creating individual posts. Blogs are essentially conversations. Often, especially at first, they’re one-sided conversations. However, if you’ve got something to say, people will comment and then all is good…maybe.
It wasn’t until today that I realized how unsatisfied I was with comments. I made a comment on Lloyd Davis‘s blog, and I didn’t know he’d responded until I went back to check. That doesn’t induce conversation! I need to know what someone says in response to my (ahem) insightful and pithy remarks.
Maybe this is handled by blog products and I’m unaware as to how, but it seems to me that whenever one of my comments receives a response, I need to be told so I can go back and respond again. Back and forth. That’s what makes a conversation work. I need to get this worked out so I can feel better about talking to non-bloggers. Unless it’s super easy and blazingly obvious, they’re not going to grok the whole conversation between blogs angle.
Of course, if you’re living a better form of blog-comment conversation let me know. And don’t say trackbacks, please. Trackbacks exclude a whole slew of people. And don’t say technorati. That only works if you’re unique.
Well some platforms give you the chance to offer RSS feeds of comments. I subscribe to Bicyclemark’s comment feed – it’s OK, but the problem is that it’s not clear in that particular case which post the comment was attached to.
Mark uses HaloScan for his comments, I haven’t checked it out.
Well, Think Progress appears to have a comment-serving RSS feed for every post. So, post a comment, then drop the feed link into your aggregator. That having been said, I tried using it once, and it seemed not to work.
On sites like Kuro5hin (based on Scoop), a logged-in user can see when someone replies to their comments within that site. That would be fine if every blogger in the world used one Scoop site (fine for everyone but the site’s maintainer, that is).
Normally I just leave the thread sitting in a Firefox tab and refresh it every once in a while. The conversation closes with the tab.
Ah, yes, the RSS feed for comments…as if I didn’t have enough RSS feed clutter as it was. :)
That’s a work around for a particular blog, but it’s not a universal solution or one that would work for people who have no idea what RSS feeds are for. And it’s certainly not pratical for the occasional comment left whilst surfing through the web. Heck, I don’t remember where I leave half my comments.
Thanks for the conversation guys!
What would a good solution look like?
Perhaps when I leave a comment, in addition to email address, blog URL, and my name, I could fill in a field with another URL that receives pings. Then the blog pings that URL when I get a reponse (or, on unthreaded comment systems, there’s any other posting). What you do with the received pings is up to you (RSS, email, a blog itself, or discard).
Looks like a job for a new freakin’ standard. Probably not a good idea to abstain from breathing until all the comment systems in the world support anything close to what you want.
I know there’s quite the clutter of RSS feeds already, but I wonder if aggregators could get even better. That is, could I dump all my comment feeds into one folder that Bloglines would show as one feed instead of me having to check each one individually? (Or does it do that already? I don’t use folders.)
Well, if you’re interested in getting a comment post, why not have the blog service send it to you? Blogger e-mails me all the comments that appear on blogs I own. They could also open that up to everyone who comments on my blog, right? That’s all public content and I don’t know why anyone who owns a blog would object.
I think that may be simplier than trying to aggregate comment feeds into one master feed. Interesting idea, though.