email and blog comments
Don’t you hate it, when you reply to a comment someone left on your blog, that you are not sure if they are going to see this reply.
Will they remember to come back, did they subscribe to the RSS comment post feed, did they tick the email notification box (my blog doesn’t have this), did they use any method to track comments they have made.
What I try to do is reply in the post so the discussion is centralised, but I will also email the person to tell them I have responded.
Wouldn’t it be good if I could ping that person automatically, when I submit a new comment to the blog post.
Most blogs have trackback which is ideal for this, but there is only a trackback for posts, what about a homepage trackback of some sort…if I could trackback the person in my reply comment then I would be more confident they will be notified of my reply.
Maybe a comments box needs a trackback field, I guess you could just link to the person’s homepage in the body of the comment and hope they check their ego feeds, but even then, the blog engimes won’t pick this up as there is no real comments engine.
Maybe a comment can have an email field, that way when you leave a comment you can email it to people at the same time, kind of like email a friend for a comment…this way you will be sure the person knows you have replied.
I mean, you often have email this post (from a blog or even from within an RSS Reader), so why not email this comment, but for it to happen at the same time you publish it…just like you trackback at the time of publishing.
That’s it, leaving a comment on a blog post can be just like sending an email…and if you don’t want to fill in the email field, you don’t have to, just publish the comment as usual.
If you are leaving the 15th comment and want to reply to commentor number 5, you can have that email address in the attention field, and all the rest of the commentors email automatically in the cc: field, or just a few in the cc: field, or none at all in the cc: field.
Actually this might have spam issues, pushing isn’t in vogue, people need to look after themselves and pull content.
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This is a great idea. I have exactly the same issue when someone leaves a comment on my site. I get new comments e-mailed to me so I have always wanted a way to respond via e-mail and have my comment automatically posted to my blog. Kind of a bit different than you have outlined, but the same general idea.
Comment by Bill Burnham — May 19, 2006 @ 6:48 pm
Ever heard of Serendipity at s9y.org? It offers mails replies to commentators by default?
Comment by Kossatsch — May 20, 2006 @ 6:55 pm
Bill,
Like yourself, I to get an email notification one someone leaves a comment on my blog…you are saying that you respond to them from your email client and at the same time this publishes your comment in your blog post.
I’ve heard about publishing a blog post via an email, but not publishing a blog post comment via email.
If that person then emails a comment back to you, will that also publish a new comment in the blog…or do only you have the power to do that
…actually how do you do it anyway?
Ironically I’m going to email this to you because I’m not sure if you grabbed the RSS post comment feed…I do wish I had “tick this box if you want to be notified by email of any new comments on this blog post”.
As I said I’ve only got this email notification of new comments, not sure how I can get it to happen for others who leave comments…and forget about plugins, my bloghost is strict on these.
Comment by Johnt — May 21, 2006 @ 2:03 am
Well, this is where a service like coComment comes into play. “Push” (ie, sending an e-mail to the person) will only be so efficient. With a system like coComment, people who care about seeing the responses made to the comments they leave have an easy way of achieving just that.
As a blogger, my problem is to get my readers to sign up with coComments so that (a) they know when I reply to them and (b) I know when they reply to me. I’m not sure what the best way to do this is.
Comment by Stephanie Booth — May 25, 2006 @ 9:38 am
Stephanie,
I agree that it must be a pull system, but push is OK if you want to CC: to people that don’t yet know they care
…at the moment the pull system is just not complete enough…it will soon I believe, as the comments issue is in vogue at the moment.
As far as I know, (not sure if things have changed) is:
1. Can you leave comments on all blog platforms using CoComments?
2. Can the re-syndication widget just show your comments?
3. Does it track a new comments if they were not made by a CoCommentor?
This is the major problem, I want to see all comments on a blog post, not just the ones made by CoCommentors.
How are you going to get the whole blogosphere to register with CoComments, it’s just not going to happen, therefore it’s limited.
I’m sure the idea is to remedy this and track comments made by people even if they don’t use CoComments (comment crawling)…this is what co.mments tries to do.
I understand CoComments has so many other great social features, but for me the fundamentals have to be in place…and that is a way to track all comments using one service like CoComments.
The only remaining issue for co.mments (and CoComments) is to hook up with as many blog platforms to enable this to happen…backend stuff the user doesn’t need to know about.
Anyway things may have changed since I last looked, here is my post from way back, CoComments: comments haven
…and another, Managing and tracking comments.
Comment by Johnt — May 28, 2006 @ 4:41 am
John,
I like the idea of trackback for comments. Linking is too much work. I’m thinking something along those lines, but it will take a while.
You’re right about hooking up with as many blog platforms as possible. A good service just works, and doesn’t bother users with the details.
So my challenge is to make co.mments work across as many blogs as possible.
Comment by assaf — June 12, 2006 @ 9:53 am
John, you asked:
1. Can you leave comments on all blog platforms using CoComments?
2. Can the re-syndication widget just show your comments?
3. Does it track a new comments if they were not made by a CoCommentor?
Here are the answers:
1. You can indeed leave comments on all platforms, but I suspect you mean “record” comments from all platforms. This will IMHO never be possible for ANY comment-tracking system as long as a comment microformat has not been agreed upon and widely implemented: http://microformats.org/wiki/comment-problem
2. Yes, it can — look on http://climbtothestars.org
3. Yes, it does if the blog was made “coCo-friendly”: http://cocomment.com/integrate . And if I’m not mistaken, more “non-user” tracking power is to come in a few weeks time.
Comment by Stephanie Booth — July 13, 2006 @ 11:55 am
Stephanie,
3. So it seems you’re saying it will track comments by people who don’t use CoComment…so is this now inline with co.mments and Commentful?
So if a non-CoComment user left a comment on a blog I’m tracking, CoComment would pick up this post, but only if the blog is “CoCo-friendly”. So you are solving the problem by taking away the effort from the commenter (ie. they don’t have to have an account with CoComment), this is great, but now it seems you have shifted the responsibility to the blog being commented on.
Is this correct?
Or will it still track comments by both CoComment and non-CoComment users even if the blog being commented on doesn’t have the “intergration” code (just like co.mments and Commentful)…is the “integration” code just a more formal method of making sure the data is picked up with less errors.
Comment by Johnt — July 14, 2006 @ 2:12 am
Or will it still track comments by both CoComment and non-CoComment users even if the blog being commented on doesn’t have the “intergration” code (just like co.mments and Commentful)…is the “integration” code just a more formal method of making sure the data is picked up with less errors.
Comment by Раскрутка сайтов — June 2, 2007 @ 11:51 pm