I Wish Blog Comments Were Easier to Follow

Weblogs are currently one of the most lively and provocative types of conversational media, all because of one simple feature: Comments. Blogs that allow comments are transformed from mere publishing to a facet of the public conversation.

The problem is, though, that's right now it's just not as easy as it should be to follow that part of the conversation. Here's what I mean...

I see three basic problems with following conversations that occur in blog comments:

1. Finding it: The content of blog comments doesn't show up in search engines as quickly or consistently as blog postings and most other kinds of web content do. This means that if I'm doing a Google or Technorati search on, say, fuel cells, I might not learn about something important on that topic which was mentioned two days ago in a blog comment thread.

2. Staying connected: Some blogging tools, like WordPress, can generate a comment feed (which contains the content of all recent comments to that weblog, or to a specific blog posting.) However, in my experience most blogs do not offer comment feeds. The whole point of a feed is it keeps people connected to a stream of content. Without a steady connection, the conversation gets hard to follow.

3. Where's it spreading? In the world of weblogs, conversations often aren't confined to a single comments thread. There are also cross-blog conversations, where a blogger will write a posting to respond to a discussion or posting from another blog, or where someone mentions a posting from another blog in a blog comment. This effect definitely creates a richer conversation, since it tends to attract more participants overall. However, such conversations can get hard to follow if the postings or comments don't specifically link back and forth to each other.

CURRENT PARTIAL SOLUTIONS

Comment feeds offer some help. First, you can subscribe to them if you wish to follow a specific conversation (which may be a hassle, but at least it's an option). Second, you can submit a comment feed to feed aggregation services such as Technorati or IceRocket, which makes the content of your blog's comments findable in keyword searches there. So if your blogging tool offers a comment feed, make sure you submit that to feed aggregations services. (As long as you're filtering out comment spam, that is.)

Search feeds can be a surprisingly effective way to discover blog conversations. A search feed is a feed generated from a search query, so that you get notified quickly of fresh postings or other online content that corresponds to your query. You can generate search feeds from just about any feed aggregation service, such as Technorati, Feedster, Google Blog Search, or IceRocket. You also can generate search feeds from Yahoo and Yahoo News.

In my feed reader, I maintain a folder of search feeds for several topics of current interest to me, like this Technorati search feed for "cohousing."

Trackbacks can help you follow cross-blog conversations to some extent. However, trackbacks are notoriously inconsistent. In fact, many blogs no longer use trackbacks because of the trackback spam problem.

Some online tools and services, such as Blogdex, track conversations (or a related concept, "memes") across weblogs. However, the problem here once again is consistency. Many conversations get missed, and those conversations which are tracked often miss entire threads.

Personally, I use the social bookmarking service Del.icio.us to track the comments I leave around the web. I've created a tag there called "mycomments." Whenever I leave a comment on a blog or web-accessible forum, I bookmark that page in Del.icio.us and select "mycomments" as I tag that item. This makes it easy for me to find the conversations I've joined, although I have to then follow subsequent contributions to those conversations manually.

IS THERE A BETTER SOLUTION?

I don't know, but I'm always on the lookout for better options. The distributed, inconsistent technological underpinnings of the blogosphere pose a considerable problem to consistent blog-tracking of any kind. Still, I can't help but think that there might be some better approaches to following blog conversations.

As I find better options, I'll write about them in this blog. But in the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Do you think this is an important issue to address in conversational media? How does it affect you? How do you deal with it currently? What options have you discovered? Please comment below!

Comments

[Andrea Weckerle]

I agree with you that some of the most exciting exchanges are taking place via blog comments. That's why I follow them carefully and, in some cases, spend even more time reading them than the originating post.

My own frustration with being unable to easily track comments came to a head last month when I was following a conversation about blog linking practices. I ended up writing my own summary post with numerous links to the bloggers and commenters who participated in the exchange.

The tips you provide will offer some relief to the time-consuming "manual" approach I've grown accustomed to.

[Amy Gahran]

Hi, Andrea. Good to see you here!

I assume you were referring to this post on your blog:
http://snipurl.com/l86a

That is indeed a good example of another strategy for pulling together blog comments. And yes, it's a hassle to implement. But I'm glad you went to the effort.

Of course, just pasting that link into this comment points up yet another weakness of many blogging tools -- they don't necessarily make it easy, possible, or clean to include hyperlinks in blog comments. It gets nearly impossible to follow a blog conversation without links!

I'll be tweaking my design for this blog to widen the center column, which will help to some extent with this blog -- but I'll also see what additional functionality Typepad offers to allow links in comments.

That reminds me... I need to see if I can generate a comment feed via Typepad... Hmmm...

Thanks again,

- Amy Gahran

[Amy Gahran]

Ok, I've just reconfigured this blog so that all URLs pasted into comments are automatically converted to hyperlinks. So that's one small bit of progress here!

On the downside, Typepad apparently does not offer a standard option for comment feeds. Bummer. I'll have to search for a hack...

- Amy Gahran

[Amy Bellinger]

Amy, great idea for a blog. I have an interest in this, having operated web message boards since 1996.

I was rambling about crossblog talk on my OPML blog back in August and heard from Roger Benningfield, the JournURL guy.

http://support.journurl.com/users/admin/index.cfm?mode=article&entry=3343

The way he describes his system it does everything I was wishing for. I haven't gotten too far with trying it out.

[Michael]

Great post Amy. I've been mulling over these very things recently while considering how best to plan and setup a CitJ site for my area. By the way, I'm following up on the topic over on my site at http://mghiemstra.com/bitsoflife/following-the-comments

-- Michael

[Berkana]

The easiest way to fix this is to go heirarchical, a la Slashdot comments. Heirarchical comment threads are way easier to follow than discussions which are flat, with people yelling over each other's heads and getting confused by each other's names, and who's responding to whom, etc.. The problem is, if you load pages the old-school way, reloading the whole page, if it is comment heavy, wastes bandwidth. All the tangential flame wars in the comments add weight.

The solution: use AJAX, (or even better if no custom XML is really necessary, AHAH) to update only the parts of the page that need changing as a discussion progresses. That alone would yield so much saved bandwidth and overhead you could probably view Slashdot style comments and forum "discussions" over dial up and still have the site be decently usable.

That's the most elegant solution, IMHO. AHAH should be used everywhere AJAX isn't; blog discussions are the perfect application of this.

To learn about AHAH, see:
http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/ahah

AHAH basically substitutes XHTML for custom XML, using AJAX techniques. Since you don't need to use any translation to translate the XML into browser parse-able XHTML, you save a step both in learning and in the implementing of the blog software.

[Amy Gahran]

Amy Bellinger mentioned earlier in this thread a tool I hadn't heard about before: JournURL (http://journURL.com). It has a pretty strong conversational media focus, and in fact combines features of blogging and forum tools.

I just wrote a quick post about it. See: http://www.rightconversation.com/2006/01/journurl_combin.html

Thanks, Amy B!

- Amy Gahran

[Amy Gahran]

Earlier in this thread, Berkana suggested that one approach to making blog comments easier to follow is to adopt a threaded approach to comments.

Yeah, I agree this can be very useful for popular blogs (or forums) that attract tons of comments. However, most blogs don't attract tons of comments. Also, many popular basic blogging tools (like Typepad, which I'm using for this blog) don't offer a threaded comment option.

While AJAX or AHAH are great options for the people with the skills and time to implement them, the reality is that they're simply not practical for most people. And you shouldn't have to be a technogeek to participate in conversational media.

I hope in this blog to cover a range of strategies, from the simple to the sophisticated. However, I never want to leave out the non-geeks. Conversational media is (or should be) accessible to everyone.

Thanks,

- Amy Gahran

[Amy Bellinger]

>Thanks, Amy B!

You're welcome, Amy G!

[Michael]

Amy,

I've whipped up a brief "spec" for some new features that might some day appear in our blogging software. Check it out here:

http://mghiemstra.com/bitsoflife/following-the-comments-redux

... and let me know what you think. Sounds like a good late-night project! :)

[Cheryl]

What do you think of this (http://www.cocomment.com/) for tracking comments? Found via (http://www.mathewingram.com/work/index.php/2006/02/04/at-last-a-way-to-track-blog-comments/)

[Cade @ Write To Right]

I agree with you that there are so many people out there that give the simple comment, but not a whole lot more. I think that it is so important for networking between bloggers.