Comments and Why RSS Is Not Enough

This is exactly why I tend to use the RSS reader to quickly scan posts but anything I want to read and/or comment on I open in another tab. It's not uncommon for me to have 40+ tabs open and often as many as 75.

I use the reader to cull the posts I want to read but read them in their natural environment as well. It's rare that I'll read a post in Google reader beyond the first paragraph.

I've been thinking about this similarly for a long time, Chris.

The biggest problems I have is when I comment on a blog and I have no idea if there are follow-ups.

One way is to just keep going back, but that's ancient technology.

The next is to get updates via emails, but it's annoying to get follow-ups on a post more than a couple of weeks old because I've moved on by then.

Of course the final is the RSS feed for the comments section, which has similar issues to subscribing via email.

Perhaps a platform similar to FriendFeed or LinkRiver for comments, or mashed together with comments might help, but I'm not sure that would 100% solve the issue.

Chris, there's no question this is true. In March of last year, I wrote a post, The Trouble With RSS: I'm Not Involved, which talked about this problem. While reading RSS, it essentially eliminates the comments section.

There are some different companies approaching this problem.

1) FriendFeed

FriendFeed makes a single stream of all your Web activity and that of your friends. If I share a RSS item from Google Reader, friends can "like" or comment on it. Often, the discussions on FriendFeed are as valuable as comments would be on the originator's site.

2) AssetBar

AssetBar shows you who else within your friend base read the same item, whether they deemed it "Worthwhile" or "View Now", and you can make public comments to all, or private comments to a few viewers.

It doesn't grab all the comments from a post, like the TechCrunch example, but it's a start.

I'm a huge fan of RSS, but have the same concerns you do.

I think the RSS feed for a comment thread on a given article is a decent idea, but doesn't "scale" right.

Here's what I think should be done:

Blogging platforms should support a "unified" RSS feed for a given user. This single feed would then include updates all "opt-in" updates -- like comment updates.

In the TechCrunch example, you'd have a single TechCrunch feed that let you keep track of all your comments with a single feed.

Of course, the ideal solution would be for someone to invent an open standard for this to work *across* sites. I thought about this for a while (I called it "OneFeed"), but never did anything about it.

There are some attempts to deal with this. I've been using co.mment.com, which gives you a bookmarklet that you click on a comment page - the comment thread is added to your co.mment login. YOu can go to co.mment to see all activities in comment threads you've tagged to follow, or you can get an RSS feed of the whole thing (which is what I do).

It's very simple and seems to work very well. I also looked at CoComment after chatting with them in their stand at a trade show, and it looks like it's much more powerful - but they don't guarantee it'll work with any browser but Firefox, which is an issue for me.

There are probably some other solutions like this out there.

one solution as well that is being developed by severl different companies is to have your comments either routed through or handled by a 3rd party - Disqus, SezWho and IntenseDebate are the three that come to mind.

Now I can only really speak of Disqus as that has become my preference in the field. The nice thing about them is that you don't need to be a blogger to have an account but getting one lets you create a common signin for all the blogs that use Disqus and that you read.

I can then either have one unified page for all the comments; and replies, you have made at hose sites. As well you can create a single RSS feed for that account.

Additionally they have the beginning of a community aspect where you can "friend" folks that have also commented and replied. You then will also see what comments they have made around the b'sphere - which is an intersting way to find new blogs.

I also have in FeedDemon a specific folder for tracking comment streams for posts on blogs that support Comment RSS - and not all do either (hint Louis :) ) but don't use Disqus. This way I can see what new comments are made as well.

The second doesn't solve the two way communication that the first does though.

I agree, but at some point a person will have to go to the site and check it out from there. You can only have so much on an RSS feed. I like having to go to the site to comment/read other's comments. But, that's just a personal preference.

I feel comments should be integrated into RSS in some way. For me, it's not a big deal because I use RSS to find articles I'm interested in, then I click through to read them, because I feel the design of the site adds to the content.

For those posts that I'm only interested to see what people say, I usually look to the bottom of the feed for one of those FeedBurner FeedFlares (the comment one), then clickthrough with that link.

I can see myself using the actual RSS reader to read my news, and in that case, I'd love to see some sort of toggle button to show all the comments on that post -- that'd be awesome.

If it's really important, why wouldn't you just bond your posts feed and comments feed together with Yahoo Pipes and distribute the combined feed?

While I don't know the answer, I totally agree. Email notification of new comments is waaaay too much bacn on a hot topic, and rss feeds for comments just kind of lose something in translation. When a good kerfuffle gets brewing on Tech Crunch, for example, pretty much the only way to stay in that state of flow is to keep refreshing the post page. And who has time for that?

I agree with 1000% -- I tend to use the RSS reader as a filter and "pop out" and go read the comments. In fact, I have a collection of blogs where I typically do this .. and keep those in a folder.

I've also tried tracking comments with tools like commentful, co.comment or cocoment - but failed to make a good habit.

RSS is good for scanning and one-way communication but if you want to participate, you have to jump in.

I use Google Reader to read RSS. I open an article in a new tab if it's long and I want to dedicate some time to reading it, or if I want to read the comments.

I've noticed on some of the blogs that I read that in each item in the RSS feed they have a small set of links at the bottom for showing Diggs and comments (including a current count for each).
I think this is intended to provide that balance between allowing the reader to read it in their own RSS reader, but also give them access to the social side of the article.

If you wanted to provide greater access to readers to the commentary then I suppose it would need one of two things:
1- a combined article and comment feed; or,
2- an RSS feed that displays the latest comments with the article all in the same feed item. Hell, since most RSS readers use web browser engines to show the feeds, you could probably (theoretically) even include a comment form. The catch is that this kinda isn't the purpose of RSS. Also, some readers might get confused. Perhaps there's some sort of widget that can be built and included with each item in the feed that takes the existing comments and displays them with a simple comment form? Probably in Flash or something?

If it's built-in via a non-widget, this might mean we need a new RSS to allow this. Or some sort of functional hybrid. Is this Atom 1.5? RSS 2.5?

Lots of great ideas here. Thanks, everyone, for your perspective. I'm thinking that *I* want the solution to be just as transparent and non-partisan. I want it to be something like RSS, or in RSS, and not the responsibility of the authors *or* the commenters. Maybe it's just threading comments RSS into post RSS, perhaps with a toggle. I guess. Not sure.

Yeah I agree with you. The comments are often the "meat", and sometimes this is even by design.

Like many here, I usually keep several tabs open so I can shift between reader and blog site.

In addition to being inconvenient, this doesn't allow me to gauge responses with a metric, to compare response to my posts against similar posts, to determine what my little piece of the "mindshare" is, so to speak.

I think this might be the idea behind Lijit's recent purchase of Big Swerve. I look forward to seeing the results of the blending.

you should check out http://fav.or.it it seems like they got it.

Agreed.

And well, I'd like, as Chris said, the post and comments combined, but with a toggle. Something like a that can be hidden/shown by clicking a link. Don't know how that can be implemented in RSS, though.

Chris has succinctly defined the basic problem with RSS as a tool for following the conversation: it gives you only the opening statement. This simply mirrors the old media problem of a magazine article and then the letters and comments coming through in the issues that follow. There's no doubt that we need to move beyond this model.

The fav.or.it solution mentioned by Idan shows that combining the post feed and the comments feeds are possible. Now we just need our feed readers of choice (in my case, Google Reader) to implement the necessary code, with the toggle switch that we all seem to feel is a necessary addition.

In short, the next stage of the conversation revolution is to move from RSS to NQSSS (Not Quite So Simple syndication!)

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