Library clips

[Update 26/07/06: coComment is crawling to the top]

Just say you read a post in your RSS Reader, and you like that post so you click to the native post to see the comments/trackbacks, there is a great discussion…you may or may not add a comment but you want to follow the discussion.

Options

Where available:

- Subscribe to the RSS Comments for the blog

- Subscribe to the RSS Comments for the blog post

- Email notification
(No good for lurking, you must participate in the discussion)

- Use a 3rd party like CoComments

When using CoComments I think you have to make a comment via the bookmarklet, then you go to your user space where you can keep up with the discussion, or put the feed in your RSS Reader to follow the discussion.
But this feed may have comments from all the posts you have commented on in the one feed…not sure.
Anyway this is a bit cumbersome if all you want to do is lurk the discussion.
Actually, the major problem is it doesn’t of yet have “comment crawling”, you will only see new comments add to the blog post, if the commenter has a CoComments account.

Also see mycomments

- Bookmark the post to re-visit daily
(Commentosphere is good for this and lots more)

These are the options, some are too manual and some clutter up your RSS Reader.

Solutions

- OPML for comments

When you want to follow a blog post hit a bookmarklet which will add it to an OPML you have set up to store RSS comment feeds for blog posts.
You are not exactly adding to a spliced feed on-the-fly (although that’s a good idea for feed remixers like Feed Digest), but you are adding to an OPML on the fly.
NOTE: I don’t know of any OPML services that have bookmarklets to add on the fly, unless you use the del.icious Reading List hack.
Then subscribe to this OPML in your RSS Reader eg. BlogBridge…this way you only have one subscription in your RSS Reader to follow discussions from numerous blog posts

The problem here is that the blog post needs to have a feed to be added to the OPML comments Reading List
…our next solution, called co.mments, is better as the blog post doesn’t require to have a feed at the post level.

- co.mments

Whether you participate or not, co.mments will track the comments stream of any blog post, access this stream at your user page, or subscribe to the feed in your RSS Reader.
NOTE: this feed will stream comments from various blog posts…there is also a stream for all co.mments users

It beats:
- RSS comments for a blog will show comments from posts you are not interested in
- RSS comments for a blog post is OK, but imagine the clutter in your RSS Reader when you are tracking 100 blog posts (some RSS Reader automatically delete feeds that don’t have new content after a set time period)
- OPML for comments requires each post to have a feed
- CoComments only shows comments if the commentors are registered with CoComments
(This is a pity, because CoComments does so much more).

co.comments is similar to a spliced feed for RSS comments of numerous blog posts, it splices it in as you go along (this doesn’t really happen as not every blog post has a comments feed at the post level…but it may seem that this is what happens)
Anyway, the benefit is that you only need one feed to follow, just like CoComments (but remember CoComments will only show select comments in the discussion).

The major benefit is that the blog post doesn’t require a comments feed.

Problem is that co.mments only supports a handful of blog and other services, it can only track comments for services it supports.

The help page says that you can add a comment, but I don’t see how to do this…this is a great idea.

Whether you add a comment from within co.mments or not, I’d like to see a separate section where you can store just the comments you have made, and organise them by tag.

TechCrunch illuminates on potential social features, like tagging as you bookmark, and aggregated these tags with the community.

- GreatNews

If a post has a comments feed the Great News RSS Reader will show a link in the footer of the post called “Track Comments”, if you click this any new comments to this post will mark the post as unread again.

I wonder if the post will climb to the top position in that feed, or if you have to scroll for it (like Attensa).

Again the catch with this method is that the post has to have its own comments feed…also you may already be happy with the RSS Reader you already use.

The good thing is that you don’t subscribe to an extra feed…another disadvantage is that what about posts you want to track that you found external to your RSS Reader.

At the moment co.mments is the best service

…if you aren’t interested in tracking discussion and just want a place to store all the comments you leave on the web, just use del.icio.us, commentosphere, or CoComments.

Related:
View and add a comment from within your RSS Reader at RSS Bandit.