Daniel R. Luke, one of this blog's readers and frequent posters, recently emailed me to point out an interesting asymmetry in the blogosphere: People who post lots of comments to blogs have no way of easily assembling, re-reading, or presenting their epistolary output. Then he unleashed an incredibly sharp idea:
This is a brilliant concept, and one that could add a wild new dimension to the blogosphere. Maybe there could be an online service -- much like, say, Typepad -- that allows you to quickly set up a comment-blog that will automatically aggregate your comments and present 'em, like a blog of its own? Another way to do it would be to tinker with RSS so that one could allow RSS agregators to "tune in" to the postings of a particular poster. (Is that latter concept already possible? I don't know enough about RSS to tell.)
However, I can say this: Comments are often some of the most interesting things about a good blog, and people who are prodigious commenters are following in a grand literary tradition. I'd be fascinated to see all their comments in one place, as a literary artifact. It'd also open up interesting new ways to explore blogs, since a commenter is an interestingly organic thread connecting various and sundry blogs together. Imagine surfing blogs by reading an item, finding a particularly smart comment, then being able to see all the items that person has commented on at other blogs.
One of the things I like about Slashdot is that I can easily find my own or somebody else's comments. I agree that agregating all your comments would be interested.
Even better than that feature, however, is that Slashdot makes it easy to find responses to your comments. I've never understood why sometimes I get email notification of replies in LiveJournal but not all the time, so they evidently have such a feature but it doesn't work all the time. If I could get notification when people respond to my comments on MovableType, TypePad or WordPress blogs as well, I wouldn't have to keep going back to blog entries that I think I might have responded at some time to see if anybody responded.
Posted by: Paul Tomblin at January 7, 2005 8:52 PM
Psst... Google seems to suggest that "commentosphere" is already in common usage.
Posted by: Jeffrey at January 7, 2005 9:39 PM
Paul: yeah, Slashdot is indeed a good example of a site that treats its comments as the primary form of "content" it offers ... and thus makes it much more fungible and searchable.
Jeffrey: heh, yes, I know that ... that's why the first link in the last paragraph of my posting brings up a google search for "commentosphere". There are about 16 mentions of it so far on the Web.
Posted by: Clive at January 8, 2005 12:38 AM
However this turns out, I'm posting here so my name can be connected with this illustrious site :)
Posted by: Arnold at January 8, 2005 5:29 AM
For a brief while I tried keeping a del.icio.us listing of all of my comments, but having to dig through the html of the pages to figure out permalinks to my comments got aggravating.
Posted by: Jemal at January 8, 2005 8:35 AM
For a brief while I tried keeping a del.icio.us listing of all of my comments, but having to dig through the html of the pages to figure out permalinks to my comments got aggravating.
Posted by: Jemal at January 8, 2005 8:38 AM
Livejournal also has a feature where you can view either your last 50 comments, or the last 50 comments left to you. LJ has a lot of good features, and they were also just bought by Six Apart, which should lead to some more development and stability (hopefully!)
BTW, great blog -- always something fascinating to see here.
Posted by: rusty at January 8, 2005 10:32 AM
If you just put a unique "signature" string in all of your comments, like a long number, you could later Google for that number and find your comments. Hmm, let's see, what would be unique . . . I know, you could use your credit card number! :-p
But seriously, the general approach would sort of work. Maybe use something like a hash of your name, or your blog's URL.
Posted by: Tom at January 8, 2005 2:20 PM
Tom, that's a great, simple idea -- I like it! Heh, Arnold, let's see if Google picks it up ...
Rusty, glad you like the site! And yes indeed, it would rock if Six Apart incorporated some of the nice community architecting that LiveJournal achieves.
Jemal, I'd not thought of using del.icio.us in that way ... not a bad hack, actually.
Posted by: Clive at January 8, 2005 3:30 PM
A unique "signature" string... like... your homepage URL! Nah, that wouldn't already be required by most sites.
As suggested, using del.icio.us (especially with something like the cocoalicious client that will grab the current selection) would indeed make it easy; it's what my "trackforward" hacks are evolving towards, especially once I finish the lookaside parts of the delicious proxy. (Trackforward is "simple for me" but not packaged in any useful way - I post, the site shows me my posting, I select it, I hit the context menu and pick "trackforward this", and it appears on my trackforward page-and-rss-feed. The details... are why it isn't packaged yet, and involve OnMyCommand, ssh, and three different python scripts. But the concept is pretty complete, and has a lot of advantages (like a primitive form of tamperproofing) over having it provided from the foreign-blog side...
Posted by: Mark Eichin at January 8, 2005 10:32 PM
Ah, a nice meaty Russian-novel sized comment...
Yes, you should be able to abstract comments from blogs...a little later in that same post you linked to...
10/13/2003: Ultimately, I think my idea about a commentblog is too modest -- in the big picture, what would be really great is making comment systems that produced output that would be easily accessible, searchable, and bloggable no matter where they are and on what platform they were originally written. In a way, the "commentsphere" could become a parallel universe to the "blogosphere," and we could have similar services to visualize and search it -- extending services like Technorati, Feedster, and Localfeeds beyond the blog and into the comments. Why would you want this? Well, as a blogger, I would think it was really cool to see where my commenters were from geographically if they chose to use geolocation tags, what other sites they were frequent commenters on, and see an RSS feeds of their comments elsewhere.
Adam Gaffin, who runs the excellent boston-online.com, says that blogs are slowly trying to redevelop what we already had in forum software -- threaded comments, unique userids that let you look at all comments by a given user, etc. Rusty and Paul both clip on to this idea by pointing at sites that are based on (Slashdot) or take a lot of inspiration from (Livejournal) forum software.
The question is, how to make forum features work across a distributed set of websites.
I now think that this is an artifact of a much bigger issue -- the fact that it's pretty hard to blog anything outside of your blogging software.
Think of all the steps you do when you take a picture to get it onto your blog.
Or, for instance, when I use an aggregator and I want to blog an item in an RSS feed, I have a hotkey. But if I want to blog a plain ol' URL within that item, I have to do a cut and paste operation.
Ditto -- each application and file format requires a different, Twister-like contortion.
What we need is a "clips manager" -- call it a uBlogger. This thing could look like a chat client and have plugins to handle different kinds of input -- a "record this comment I am writing" plugin that preserves the comment and links to the main article. Drag and drop photos, videos, urls, have one that runs on your phone, IRC chats, whatever....
Secondly, a lot of interesting stuff in and around the blogosphere has been about tagging, feeding, and linking (think folksonomies like del.icio.us, Flickr, et al, which then produce feeds of items of mixed provenance with a single tag) and social networking systems and FOAF.
Thirdly: frassle! frassle.rura.org. In this blogging system, everything is a blog entry -- the entry, the comment, the item in the aggregator. And, if you read, point to or link to an item that another frassle blogger is reading or pointing to, you get del.icio.us style "and 29 others" feedback. Part of the archaeology problem of having to dig so much to get permalinks at all for comments is that they're being treated as a separate and lesser data item by the blogging system itself. But "lesser" should be a display decision, not a data schema decision. Maybe over at Daniel's blog his comments would be "foreground," while at your place, everybody else's...comments... would be background, except yours. Maybe you could flick a switch for a day and reverse it, like those Lord of Misrule festivals where the peasants get to be nobility for a day.
Posted by: Lisa Williams at January 9, 2005 2:30 AM
Posted by: Merkin at January 9, 2005 3:39 AM
Comment systems simply need the option to e-mail you a carbon copy of your posts. Problem solved.
Posted by: Jerry Kindall at January 9, 2005 5:12 AM
There is a CMS (Content Management System) freely available that can do all that plus a lot more. Visit www.phpnuke.org. It has nothing to do with nuclear bombs ;-)
Posted by: phpNuke Org at January 9, 2005 6:46 AM
Posted by: glory at January 9, 2005 11:38 AM
I'm not surprised this idea has been floating around -- it's excellent. Some great ideas for ways of implementing this ...
Posted by: Clive at January 9, 2005 6:36 PM
Posted by: glory at January 9, 2005 10:10 PM
Posted by: Anonymous at January 9, 2005 10:10 PM
I would like to thank Clive for synthesizing in to neatly organized, comprehensible prose some thoughts on blog comments that I emailed to him not long ago . No wonder he writes for Wired. I will not try to add explication where explication is not needed, but I will say this:
While an important part of the idea is that commenters be able to retain a record of what it is they contribute to the blogosphere, the crux of the idea is what Clive perfectly crystallized with these two sentences:
"It'd also open up interesting new ways to explore blogs, since a commenter is an interestingly organic thread connecting various and sundry blogs together. Imagine surfing blogs by reading an item, finding a particularly smart comment, then being able to see all the items that person has commented on at other blogs."
As it is, IMHO, there is nothing that really naturally propels anyone through the blogosphere. People hop around from one blog to another according to an unknown, individual formula. Of course every blog has a list of links, but these links don't really provide much information, and one can quickly become overwhelmed by them. I don't really think it is how many people navigate the blogosphere. That's not to say that I think they're useless--in fact it is from such a link on Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs that I found Collision Detection. Nevertheless, I think something more can be added. Searchable comments would bind blogs together in a more meaningful way. People who want people to leave behind interesting comments on their blog will have to leave behind interesting comments on other people's blogs. Additionally, the blog audience would suddenly be transformed into bloggers themselves (as long as they are willing to leave behind comments now and then). My hunch is that if people knew that there comments could be aggregated in one place and seen by others, they would comment not only with greater frequency, but also with greater care. Thus, with this virtuous circle, the blogosphere would become much better than it currently is.
Lastly, thanks to everyone for their feedback on this concept.
Posted by: Daniel Luke at January 10, 2005 1:12 AM
A request for the Lazyweb, methinks.
Posted by: Gordon Knumpke at January 10, 2005 9:27 AM
I have a blog, but have never turned on comments, for two reasons. 1) I haven't learned how. 2) I don't like the anonymity of internet comments. With enough malicious thought, someone could totally wreck my day and possibly alter the content of my future writing, and they could do so without me ever knowing who they are. I think it tends to encourage irresponsible writing, and that's where I would note a marked difference from the "grand literary tradition."
Posted by: David Ziegler at January 10, 2005 1:56 PM
Flickr already has this feature. On your Flickr home page, there's a link called "comments you've made", which takes you to a page listing all your comments in reverse chronological order. Any comments more recent than yours (i.e. comments that might be replies to yours) are also shown.
It's a great feature. I would love to see something similar implemented everywhere.
Posted by: otherthings at January 10, 2005 2:34 PM
What I generally do to keep track of comments works reasonably well. After posting a comment, I reload the page in my browser so that the comment is displayed, then cut and paste the entry and comment into a text file I keep for each the blog where I frequently comment. This isn't as cool as an rss feed that would send me the comment and also comments on the comment, but at least it allows me to keep track of what I've said where. In some cases I later go back to see what sort of response has been made, sometimes not.
it *would* certainly be nice if I could set up a feed that would contain the comment I make, the entry that inspired it and any subsequent comments that reference my own.
Posted by: john t unger at January 14, 2005 12:37 AM
Posted by: Seb at January 17, 2005 11:12 AM
Er, isn't this sort of thing what TrackBack is for? I've often considered setting up an alternate blog, solely to track my comments to other places. But that relies on others displaying their TrackBacks in a maximally usable way, I suppose.
Posted by: misuba at January 17, 2005 5:16 PM
Several people have mentioned trackback. Trackback is a great idea that is similar in some ways to the idea of the commentosphere. I can see how it is useful for people who have blogs of their own and want to direct people to their blog (while also contributing to some small degree, I suppose, to other people's blogs). But what about people who don't have a blog of their own, and have no interest in starting one? I simply like to read what other people are saying and occasionally leave behind a comment. Trackback does nothing for me.
Posted by: Daniel Luke at January 17, 2005 6:44 PM
I think the biggest issue, for me, is knowing when a comment is added to a string of comments I've been participating in...
For example, I make a comment on someone else's blog and someone makes another comment, in response to mine. I'd like to know when that happens instead of having to go back and check for responses. It's not always easy to remember which blogs I've made a comment on.
Posted by: darren at January 17, 2005 11:13 PM
you can, as mentioned, use del.icio.us to do this, using a unique tag, e.g. 'mycomments' for all of your comments. Also, many BB software packages have a "notify me of replies to this thread' feature that blog software could incorporate.
Let's face it though, comments are second class citizens on blogs - you generally can't edit them, you can't see replies to them, etc. One of the disappointing things about blog software is that there hasn't been much innovation around the interconnectedness in the last year or so. Perhaps I'm just too impatient...
Posted by: rick gregory at January 18, 2005 2:40 PM
No, it's not just you, Rick. The feature set for comments on blogs isn't even up to the old Usenet standards, where messages would be automatically marked as read and you could navigate through threads (at least, via trn, which was my newsreader of choice). And I find it frustrating as well.
There are a couple things that help, like tracking your comments via del.icio.us, as others mentioned. This doubles as both helping you remember which blog posts to check for replies, and also allows other people to follow and read your comments (and I'm definitely gonna track this long sucker). Another thing that I do on blogs that have comment permalinks (which this blog does not have, unfortunately) is to have the attribution for a quote also be a link to the comment that I'm quoting. But this is quite labor-intensive (especially if you have to view the page source to find the comment permalinks), and only lets you navigate through threads backwards, not forwards. Blog owners can greatly ease this by using visible comment permalinks and also supporting Textile, which makes it much easier to create links.
I think a big part of the issue is that a lot of blogs (yes, including my own) are Movable Type or TypePad blogs with static individual archives, which means changes to the page require a rebuild of it. I would presume using dynamic individual archives using PHP would open up a lot of the features available on things like phpBB.
Posted by: fling93 at January 18, 2005 10:28 PM
No, it's not just you, Rick. The feature set for comments on blogs isn't even up to the old Usenet standards, where messages would be automatically marked as read and you could navigate through threads (at least, via trn, which was my newsreader of choice). And I find it frustrating as well.
There are a couple things that help, like tracking your comments via del.icio.us, as others mentioned. This doubles as both helping you remember which blog posts to check for replies, and also allows other people to follow and read your comments (and I'm definitely gonna track this long sucker). Another thing that I do on blogs that have comment permalinks (which this blog does not have, unfortunately) is to have the attribution for a quote also be a link to the comment that I'm quoting. But this is quite labor-intensive (especially if you have to view the page source to find the comment permalinks), and only lets you navigate through threads backwards, not forwards. Blog owners can greatly ease this by using visible comment permalinks and also supporting Textile, which makes it much easier to create links.
But there's a lot of things left unaddressed, like being able to edit past comments, or being able to save a draft for later (and indeed, it's extremely easy to completely lose a comment, or double-post it, which is ridiculous). I think a big part of the issue is that a lot of blogs (yes, including my own) are Movable Type or TypePad blogs with static individual archives, which means changes to the page require a rebuild of it. I would presume using dynamic individual archives using PHP would open up a lot of the features available on things like phpBB.
Posted by: fling93 at January 18, 2005 10:32 PM
Oy, talk about self-referential. :) When it gave me the error, I did keep reloading the original page a few times to see whether it would appear anyway, and then eventually reposted it when it didn't.
Note, they're not perfect duplicates. The second comment has a few additions.
Posted by: fling93 at January 18, 2005 10:34 PM
Posted by: online poker at January 28, 2005 5:51 AM
Posted by: online poker at January 29, 2005 4:34 PM
visit scat for good shit to eat.
Posted by: scat sex at February 8, 2005 2:51 AM
One of the things I like about Slashdot is that I can easily find my own or somebody else's comments. I agree that agregating all your comments would be interested.
Even better than that feature, however, is that Slashdot makes it easy to find responses to your comments. I've never understood why sometimes I get email notification of replies in LiveJournal but not all the time, so they evidently have such a feature but it doesn't work all the time. If I could get notification when people respond to my comments on MovableType, TypePad or WordPress blogs as well, I wouldn't have to keep going back to blog entries that I think I might have responded at some time to see if anybody responded.
Posted by: Paul Tomblin at January 7, 2005 8:52 PM
Psst... Google seems to suggest that "commentosphere" is already in common usage.
Posted by: Jeffrey at January 7, 2005 9:39 PM
Paul: yeah, Slashdot is indeed a good example of a site that treats its comments as the primary form of "content" it offers ... and thus makes it much more fungible and searchable.
Jeffrey: heh, yes, I know that ... that's why the first link in the last paragraph of my posting brings up a google search for "commentosphere". There are about 16 mentions of it so far on the Web.
Posted by: Clive at January 8, 2005 12:38 AM
However this turns out, I'm posting here so my name can be connected with this illustrious site :)
Posted by: Arnold at January 8, 2005 5:29 AM
For a brief while I tried keeping a del.icio.us listing of all of my comments, but having to dig through the html of the pages to figure out permalinks to my comments got aggravating.
Posted by: Jemal at January 8, 2005 8:35 AM
For a brief while I tried keeping a del.icio.us listing of all of my comments, but having to dig through the html of the pages to figure out permalinks to my comments got aggravating.
Posted by: Jemal at January 8, 2005 8:38 AM
Livejournal also has a feature where you can view either your last 50 comments, or the last 50 comments left to you. LJ has a lot of good features, and they were also just bought by Six Apart, which should lead to some more development and stability (hopefully!)
BTW, great blog -- always something fascinating to see here.
Posted by: rusty at January 8, 2005 10:32 AM
If you just put a unique "signature" string in all of your comments, like a long number, you could later Google for that number and find your comments. Hmm, let's see, what would be unique . . . I know, you could use your credit card number! :-p
But seriously, the general approach would sort of work. Maybe use something like a hash of your name, or your blog's URL.
Posted by: Tom at January 8, 2005 2:20 PM
Tom, that's a great, simple idea -- I like it! Heh, Arnold, let's see if Google picks it up ...
Rusty, glad you like the site! And yes indeed, it would rock if Six Apart incorporated some of the nice community architecting that LiveJournal achieves.
Jemal, I'd not thought of using del.icio.us in that way ... not a bad hack, actually.
Posted by: Clive at January 8, 2005 3:30 PM
A unique "signature" string... like... your homepage URL! Nah, that wouldn't already be required by most sites.
As suggested, using del.icio.us (especially with something like the cocoalicious client that will grab the current selection) would indeed make it easy; it's what my "trackforward" hacks are evolving towards, especially once I finish the lookaside parts of the delicious proxy. (Trackforward is "simple for me" but not packaged in any useful way - I post, the site shows me my posting, I select it, I hit the context menu and pick "trackforward this", and it appears on my trackforward page-and-rss-feed. The details... are why it isn't packaged yet, and involve OnMyCommand, ssh, and three different python scripts. But the concept is pretty complete, and has a lot of advantages (like a primitive form of tamperproofing) over having it provided from the foreign-blog side...
Posted by: Mark Eichin at January 8, 2005 10:32 PM
Ah, a nice meaty Russian-novel sized comment...
Yes, you should be able to abstract comments from blogs...a little later in that same post you linked to...
10/13/2003: Ultimately, I think my idea about a commentblog is too modest -- in the big picture, what would be really great is making comment systems that produced output that would be easily accessible, searchable, and bloggable no matter where they are and on what platform they were originally written. In a way, the "commentsphere" could become a parallel universe to the "blogosphere," and we could have similar services to visualize and search it -- extending services like Technorati, Feedster, and Localfeeds beyond the blog and into the comments. Why would you want this? Well, as a blogger, I would think it was really cool to see where my commenters were from geographically if they chose to use geolocation tags, what other sites they were frequent commenters on, and see an RSS feeds of their comments elsewhere.
Adam Gaffin, who runs the excellent boston-online.com, says that blogs are slowly trying to redevelop what we already had in forum software -- threaded comments, unique userids that let you look at all comments by a given user, etc. Rusty and Paul both clip on to this idea by pointing at sites that are based on (Slashdot) or take a lot of inspiration from (Livejournal) forum software.
The question is, how to make forum features work across a distributed set of websites.
I now think that this is an artifact of a much bigger issue -- the fact that it's pretty hard to blog anything outside of your blogging software.
Think of all the steps you do when you take a picture to get it onto your blog.
Or, for instance, when I use an aggregator and I want to blog an item in an RSS feed, I have a hotkey. But if I want to blog a plain ol' URL within that item, I have to do a cut and paste operation.
Ditto -- each application and file format requires a different, Twister-like contortion.
What we need is a "clips manager" -- call it a uBlogger. This thing could look like a chat client and have plugins to handle different kinds of input -- a "record this comment I am writing" plugin that preserves the comment and links to the main article. Drag and drop photos, videos, urls, have one that runs on your phone, IRC chats, whatever....
Secondly, a lot of interesting stuff in and around the blogosphere has been about tagging, feeding, and linking (think folksonomies like del.icio.us, Flickr, et al, which then produce feeds of items of mixed provenance with a single tag) and social networking systems and FOAF.
Thirdly: frassle! frassle.rura.org. In this blogging system, everything is a blog entry -- the entry, the comment, the item in the aggregator. And, if you read, point to or link to an item that another frassle blogger is reading or pointing to, you get del.icio.us style "and 29 others" feedback. Part of the archaeology problem of having to dig so much to get permalinks at all for comments is that they're being treated as a separate and lesser data item by the blogging system itself. But "lesser" should be a display decision, not a data schema decision. Maybe over at Daniel's blog his comments would be "foreground," while at your place, everybody else's...comments... would be background, except yours. Maybe you could flick a switch for a day and reverse it, like those Lord of Misrule festivals where the peasants get to be nobility for a day.
Posted by: Lisa Williams at January 9, 2005 2:30 AM
http://www.benhammersley.com/weblog/2004/12/30/crossposter_for_movable_type.html
"Crossposter for Movable Type"
Posted by: Merkin at January 9, 2005 3:39 AM
Comment systems simply need the option to e-mail you a carbon copy of your posts. Problem solved.
Posted by: Jerry Kindall at January 9, 2005 5:12 AM
There is a CMS (Content Management System) freely available that can do all that plus a lot more. Visit www.phpnuke.org. It has nothing to do with nuclear bombs ;-)
Posted by: phpNuke Org at January 9, 2005 6:46 AM
that's sorta what this guy wants :D
cheers!
Posted by: glory at January 9, 2005 11:38 AM
I'm not surprised this idea has been floating around -- it's excellent. Some great ideas for ways of implementing this ...
Posted by: Clive at January 9, 2005 6:36 PM
here's one that typekey could maybe implement! [: via :]
cheers!
Posted by: glory at January 9, 2005 10:10 PM
here's one that typekey could maybe implement! [: via :]
cheers!
Posted by: Anonymous at January 9, 2005 10:10 PM
I would like to thank Clive for synthesizing in to neatly organized, comprehensible prose some thoughts on blog comments that I emailed to him not long ago . No wonder he writes for Wired. I will not try to add explication where explication is not needed, but I will say this:
While an important part of the idea is that commenters be able to retain a record of what it is they contribute to the blogosphere, the crux of the idea is what Clive perfectly crystallized with these two sentences:
"It'd also open up interesting new ways to explore blogs, since a commenter is an interestingly organic thread connecting various and sundry blogs together. Imagine surfing blogs by reading an item, finding a particularly smart comment, then being able to see all the items that person has commented on at other blogs."
As it is, IMHO, there is nothing that really naturally propels anyone through the blogosphere. People hop around from one blog to another according to an unknown, individual formula. Of course every blog has a list of links, but these links don't really provide much information, and one can quickly become overwhelmed by them. I don't really think it is how many people navigate the blogosphere. That's not to say that I think they're useless--in fact it is from such a link on Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs that I found Collision Detection. Nevertheless, I think something more can be added. Searchable comments would bind blogs together in a more meaningful way. People who want people to leave behind interesting comments on their blog will have to leave behind interesting comments on other people's blogs. Additionally, the blog audience would suddenly be transformed into bloggers themselves (as long as they are willing to leave behind comments now and then). My hunch is that if people knew that there comments could be aggregated in one place and seen by others, they would comment not only with greater frequency, but also with greater care. Thus, with this virtuous circle, the blogosphere would become much better than it currently is.
Lastly, thanks to everyone for their feedback on this concept.
Posted by: Daniel Luke at January 10, 2005 1:12 AM
A request for the Lazyweb, methinks.
Posted by: Gordon Knumpke at January 10, 2005 9:27 AM
I have a blog, but have never turned on comments, for two reasons. 1) I haven't learned how. 2) I don't like the anonymity of internet comments. With enough malicious thought, someone could totally wreck my day and possibly alter the content of my future writing, and they could do so without me ever knowing who they are. I think it tends to encourage irresponsible writing, and that's where I would note a marked difference from the "grand literary tradition."
Posted by: David Ziegler at January 10, 2005 1:56 PM
Flickr already has this feature. On your Flickr home page, there's a link called "comments you've made", which takes you to a page listing all your comments in reverse chronological order. Any comments more recent than yours (i.e. comments that might be replies to yours) are also shown.
It's a great feature. I would love to see something similar implemented everywhere.
Posted by: otherthings at January 10, 2005 2:34 PM
What I generally do to keep track of comments works reasonably well. After posting a comment, I reload the page in my browser so that the comment is displayed, then cut and paste the entry and comment into a text file I keep for each the blog where I frequently comment. This isn't as cool as an rss feed that would send me the comment and also comments on the comment, but at least it allows me to keep track of what I've said where. In some cases I later go back to see what sort of response has been made, sometimes not.
it *would* certainly be nice if I could set up a feed that would contain the comment I make, the entry that inspired it and any subsequent comments that reference my own.
Posted by: john t unger at January 14, 2005 12:37 AM
The del.icio.us linklogging systems provides an easy way to keep a track of places where you've left comments, and display them on your weblog if you want. I've written about it here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2004/12/29.html#a1669
See examples at http://del.icio.us/tag/MyComments.
(Predictably, you'll find a link to this very page on my personal comments page - http://del.icio.us/sebpaquet/MyComments)
Posted by: Seb at January 17, 2005 11:12 AM
Er, isn't this sort of thing what TrackBack is for? I've often considered setting up an alternate blog, solely to track my comments to other places. But that relies on others displaying their TrackBacks in a maximally usable way, I suppose.
Posted by: misuba at January 17, 2005 5:16 PM
Several people have mentioned trackback. Trackback is a great idea that is similar in some ways to the idea of the commentosphere. I can see how it is useful for people who have blogs of their own and want to direct people to their blog (while also contributing to some small degree, I suppose, to other people's blogs). But what about people who don't have a blog of their own, and have no interest in starting one? I simply like to read what other people are saying and occasionally leave behind a comment. Trackback does nothing for me.
Posted by: Daniel Luke at January 17, 2005 6:44 PM
I think the biggest issue, for me, is knowing when a comment is added to a string of comments I've been participating in...
For example, I make a comment on someone else's blog and someone makes another comment, in response to mine. I'd like to know when that happens instead of having to go back and check for responses. It's not always easy to remember which blogs I've made a comment on.
Posted by: darren at January 17, 2005 11:13 PM
you can, as mentioned, use del.icio.us to do this, using a unique tag, e.g. 'mycomments' for all of your comments. Also, many BB software packages have a "notify me of replies to this thread' feature that blog software could incorporate.
Let's face it though, comments are second class citizens on blogs - you generally can't edit them, you can't see replies to them, etc. One of the disappointing things about blog software is that there hasn't been much innovation around the interconnectedness in the last year or so. Perhaps I'm just too impatient...
Posted by: rick gregory at January 18, 2005 2:40 PM
No, it's not just you, Rick. The feature set for comments on blogs isn't even up to the old Usenet standards, where messages would be automatically marked as read and you could navigate through threads (at least, via trn, which was my newsreader of choice). And I find it frustrating as well.
There are a couple things that help, like tracking your comments via del.icio.us, as others mentioned. This doubles as both helping you remember which blog posts to check for replies, and also allows other people to follow and read your comments (and I'm definitely gonna track this long sucker). Another thing that I do on blogs that have comment permalinks (which this blog does not have, unfortunately) is to have the attribution for a quote also be a link to the comment that I'm quoting. But this is quite labor-intensive (especially if you have to view the page source to find the comment permalinks), and only lets you navigate through threads backwards, not forwards. Blog owners can greatly ease this by using visible comment permalinks and also supporting Textile, which makes it much easier to create links.
I think a big part of the issue is that a lot of blogs (yes, including my own) are Movable Type or TypePad blogs with static individual archives, which means changes to the page require a rebuild of it. I would presume using dynamic individual archives using PHP would open up a lot of the features available on things like phpBB.
Posted by: fling93 at January 18, 2005 10:28 PM
No, it's not just you, Rick. The feature set for comments on blogs isn't even up to the old Usenet standards, where messages would be automatically marked as read and you could navigate through threads (at least, via trn, which was my newsreader of choice). And I find it frustrating as well.
There are a couple things that help, like tracking your comments via del.icio.us, as others mentioned. This doubles as both helping you remember which blog posts to check for replies, and also allows other people to follow and read your comments (and I'm definitely gonna track this long sucker). Another thing that I do on blogs that have comment permalinks (which this blog does not have, unfortunately) is to have the attribution for a quote also be a link to the comment that I'm quoting. But this is quite labor-intensive (especially if you have to view the page source to find the comment permalinks), and only lets you navigate through threads backwards, not forwards. Blog owners can greatly ease this by using visible comment permalinks and also supporting Textile, which makes it much easier to create links.
But there's a lot of things left unaddressed, like being able to edit past comments, or being able to save a draft for later (and indeed, it's extremely easy to completely lose a comment, or double-post it, which is ridiculous). I think a big part of the issue is that a lot of blogs (yes, including my own) are Movable Type or TypePad blogs with static individual archives, which means changes to the page require a rebuild of it. I would presume using dynamic individual archives using PHP would open up a lot of the features available on things like phpBB.
Posted by: fling93 at January 18, 2005 10:32 PM
Oy, talk about self-referential. :) When it gave me the error, I did keep reloading the original page a few times to see whether it would appear anyway, and then eventually reposted it when it didn't.
Note, they're not perfect duplicates. The second comment has a few additions.
Posted by: fling93 at January 18, 2005 10:34 PM
7320 http://www.online-poker-web.net
online poker
Posted by: online poker at January 28, 2005 5:51 AM
2246 want to play online poker mate?
Posted by: online poker at January 29, 2005 4:34 PM
visit scat for good shit to eat.
Posted by: scat sex at February 8, 2005 2:51 AM