Thoughts About

Blog Comments: The Next Step?

If you read my previous blog entry, you can see that I wrote it as comment on a post on onrelease.org which was actually commenting my original blog entry. Confused, eh? There's the comment feature in Movable Type, why don't we just use that? For one, blog spamming is becoming worse and worse. In addition, if your write a long post, you tend to have something to say - or at least you think you have - so naturally you want to highlight that post. If you post it in a long chain of comments it might just get lost in the noise. Often comments you post on others' blogs are just like your blog entries, but the comment feature is awkward to use and feels a bit like it's just glued on top of the existing blogging functionality. So I had a thought: why doesn't Movable Type and others provide better comment integration among bloggers? TrackBack I guess, is an attempt to do something like this, but I don't see why comment and TrackBack need to be and look like separate features to the viewer. Somebody else's blog entry commenting your blog entry could be shown as a comment on your blog using an inline frame or as a local copy (although there might be security considerations in the latter), and your entry could be shown as a comment on others' blogs. That way, commenting blogs would be more uniform but would still provide different ways for adding comments. Maybe I should try it out to see how well it would work. I'm probably not the first one to think about this, anyone know if anybody else is thinking or already developing new functionality along the same lines?