On some ‘closed’ blogging / forum services there are present some features you cannot, present, find elsewhere. One of the most prominent of these is the ability to see all comments by a particular user. Some people have decided to overcome this problem by posting their comments to del.icio.us. Johan Sundström at ecmanaut has come up with a Greasemonkey script to automate the process. This then allows you to have an RSS feed and aggregation page (powered nicely by del.icio.us) for all comments you place on other people’s blogs, and even to publish all or some of these comments to your sidebar. I fully agree with the concept here, however I believe that using del.icio.us in this manner is counterproductive, for a few reasons :

1. Del.icio.us is about posting URLs, comments are content with often no proper URL themselves
2. Del.icio.us is about tagging, and while there is much useful metadata that can be associated with a comment, I see little or no use in tagging it
3. Because del.icio.us is not meant for this application, many features that would be useful to comments are not and will never be implemented (see below)

Viewing all comments by a particular person is certianly a useful option, even including comments posted on their own blog, however a way to filter them to just on other people’s blogs would be useful. Following all comments on a particular post is certianly also a useful option, since so many bloggers are forced to reply to comments via their blog and via email to make sure the reply is received. Following all comments for a particular blog would also be useful. While some of these features are already provided by some blogging platforms / services, they are rarely all offered and rarely in a conveniant way.

What we truly need is a new service, one that tracks comments (and possible trackbacks) from all blogs just as is being done now by those posting to del.icio.us. It could provide feeds and aggregation pages for all the features I’ve listed above, and probably many I haven’t thought of. Aggregation could also be merged in-service to one page / feed, much like the del.icio.us inbox, so that you could add posts / blogs to monitor the comments of without overcrowding your feedreader with feeds for old posts or even for all the blogs you comment on. A single feed is much more conveniant for such practise.

Johan’s Greasemonkey script could easily be modified to work with such a service instead of with del.icio.us, and independant bloggers could even integrate the comment-to-commentblogger link directly into their ‘your comment has been posted’ pages. Eventually, services like Blogger could theoretically even allow you to store your commentblogger username and password in your account and auto-post all your comments to your commentblogger account.

Tags: Blogging Comments del.icio.us delicious Syndication Web2.0 ecmanaut

I am feeling much better now I was mostly better yesterday, well enough to enjoy my birthday, so I’m thankful for that. I didn’t have the stomache for snacking at the party, but it could have been much worse I had a great day, first off getting much more schoolwork done than I had expected, and then with the party after supper. We had the whole station over after supper for snacks and a game. We played a modified version of Taboo (if you’ve heard of that) with words that had something to do with me.

School continues to go very well today as I have almost finished an entire week of English in the last hour. Chels gets to chat tomorrow, and I’m thinking of calling her on Saturday, so I’m quite happy right now

Google has launched a new service, dubbed ‘Google Analytics‘. It seems to be sort of like Mint, an elaborate Javascript-powered hitcounter and traffic measuring service. Unlike Mint, it is not hosted off of your webspace, but is rather managed on the Google servers. Also unlike Mint, it is free. Having never used Mint, I am not really qualified to do a comparison otherwise, but I may try out Google Analytics eventually.

Tags: Google Google Analytics Web Webstats

Del.icio.us pushed a bunch of new features the other day (see announcement). One of the best things they’ve done is released a help section. While del.icio.us is not complicated and anyone who knows what they’re doing can figure it out by messing with it (especially if subscribed to their mailing list), however for new users this is not all that appealing, and a help section is a time-saver, even for more advanced users.

Another new feature in this set is what they’re calling ‘editable breadcrumbs’. Basically it’s what the advanced del.icio.us users have been doing since the beginning, navigating to an exact tag combination without having to click all the proper navigation links in the sidebar. Whereas people have been using the easy-to-remember URL system on del.icio.us to do this by entering manual URLs in the location bar of their browser, this system adds a textbox to the header area on your del.icio.us account so you can enter such custom tag combinations there directly, without having to remember the URL form, which could be useful to new users.

Following up to their Javascript Link Rolls feature (which allows you to easily include your recent del.icio.us bookmarks in your website), they have released ‘Tag Rolls’. The nice, dynamic interface lets you create, basically, a tag cloud of your del.icio.us bookmarks and provides a Javascript code to use for including it in your website.

Tags: del.icio.us delicious Websites

Ya, I’m sick today. Started about last night, and it’s looking to be a relatively serious case of the flu. Please pray for me, I don’t want to be sick on my birthday

In other news – Chels gets to chat for one hour sometime this week for her birthday, her parents are letting her… awesome Time yet to be set, but I’ll be on no matter when it is or if I’m even still sick then

Not much else going on just now… at least not that I can think of…