DISQUS

tommyl · 1 year ago

Divorcing comments from the post they're commenting on doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And neither does having more than one aggregator, social media or not.

I'm writing this from the pencil icon in Newsriver - actually this first time I've used that aggregator. This idea makes a lot of sense. Why aren't more aggregators offering it?

Eric Rice · 1 year ago

Kinda wish Happymemes were friendlier to the bottom line.

On a semi-related note, have you any opinions (new or past) about the reappearance of the 'stealability' of RSS in regards to the syndication freedom and the 'don't like it, don't publish it' vibe people throw about at those that do have some RSS content battles to wage?

Jeff Schiller · 1 year ago

Yep - totally agree. There's already solutions for this in both major formats: the Atom Threading Extensions (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685) and the RSS Comment thing. More blogs need to be made aware of this (WordPress 2.5 supports this out of the box) and then aggregators need to be made aware of it. Liferea already does, but we need a major online one like Google Reader to get with the program.

Richard Cunningham · 1 year ago

Actually there are some other tags that are better that simply giving a link to the HTML version of the comments (though I notice you use disqus on your blog which is cool).

One is having a RSS feed for the comments, this means you can subscribe to comments so that you see the replies to your comments in your feed reader so it encourages you to comment and you can track the discussion so that you might comment again.
This can be done with
<wfw:commentRss> in the http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/ namespace, this seems to be used on quite a few feeds.

Another is the number of comments a post has, the only place I've seen this is in
<slash:comments> in the http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash namespace
this seems to be quite rare from the feeds I read.

Both are used on Telegraph blogs site (of all places!) for example: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/Feed.rss

I am working on a site which uses these when they are available:
http://www.friendbinder.com

tommyl · 1 year ago

I've been digging around in NetNewsWire and find it indirectly supports commenting on the blog for some feeds, including this one. Right click on a headline in the headline pane and you'll get a context menu that lists "open comments" if that's available for that feed.

khodabakchian · 1 year ago

It would be great if the next version of RSS and ATOM could go further and not only point to the comment feed but define a standard set of interactions for adding comments.

James Snell · 1 year ago

khodabakchian: look at rfc5023 and rfc4685. between the two of those you have everything you need.

khodabakchian · 1 year ago

Thanks for the heads up James. will take a look!

anon · 1 year ago

Funny enough, everyone's acting like this is a new thing. For year's people have been posting links on message boards, IRC, and having their own conversation there.

On the RSS 2.0 <comments> - If I'm understanding correctly this element contains a single url and can only exist once. Isn't the real problem that we'd like a way to discover all comments? Kinda sounds like an opportunity, methinks.

Mayel · 1 year ago

What I did when I implemented comments on the podcast aggregator http://podemus.com was every time a visitor leaves a comment about a podcast, I send the original blog post a pingback/trackback containing the comment, thus it appears both on the aggregator and on the comment thread of the author's blog.

ka9dgx · 1 year ago

Dave, I think the < comments > element will go a good way towards breaking us out of the Silo/Walled garden model of life that Doc Searls describes. If we can have content and comments aggregated from stuff that might not even be online, a persistent web of content (as opposed to the web of pages on servers) might become a real possibility.

It might even be possible to write something that can read feeds, take comments, and then post them once I get back on the net after my daily commute to/from Chicago. ;-)

Keep up the good work.

--Mike--

Andy · 1 year ago

Dave, I'm all for the idea of having the comments as part of the feed for aggregators and feedreaders to use as they desire.

However, I do think that there is a place for independant comments. I pick up a lot of articles via Slashdot and the typical number of comments on there are in the order of hundreds. My concern is that if these hundred of comments were directly connected to blogs it might confuse the message that I am trying to get across, or if I was a corporate they might dilute my corporate brand. If I'd wanted a bulletinboard then I'd have setup up instead. For these volumes of comments, I'd have to provide some automoderation or provide resource to moderation of the comments.

I have no problem with people commenting on my blogs but not at my expense.