I have updated my inline comments form hack to be compatible with coComment. Note that if you have the comments forms visible on your main and archive pages like I do there will still be a problem there, but on item pages the values will be filled it and the coComment detector automatically invoked.

There has been much discussion recently about comment syndication. I have made some of my own contributions to this, including Commentosphere and Blogger Recent Comments. While all of this is good and useful in its own way, syndication is useless without aggregation.

Currently, to track comments for interesting discussion / replies to your own you must subscribe to many comments feeds from different blogs and posts. This will quickly clutter your feedreader even if you only subscribe to the ones that are most important. Something that can help this, at least a little, is combining the feeds together into one megafeed, using something like feedshake or the Commentosphere Aggregator (see my aggregator for an example). While this works to some degree, it is ultimately unsatisfactory.

So here’s the idea — have feed readers aggregate comments alongside the post. A post then appears unread if it has unread comments as well as if it is itself unread. The new comments are highlighted on viewing the feed and marked unread. Another possibility would be to have a little ‘comments’ icon next to the post title that shows if there are no comments, new comments, or all read comments on a post. Clicking the icon would bring up the comments for that post (likely within the aggragator, not just a link to the #comments or anything like that).

This whole idea does, of course, assume that the aggregator can get to the comments somehow. There needs to be some way to take the link URL (usually to the post page) and get the comments feed URL for that post. (Assuming there is one. If there isn’t, that’s in the realm of syndication, not aggregation.) To facilitate this, I am proposing a simple piece of standard markup. Most blogs that have comments feeds for every post have a link to that feed somewhere on the post page. If we made it standard protocol to set rel=”alternate comments” (obviously, just like with relTag, you can have other things in the rel-list as well, but require both of these) for these links, the aggregators could pull them out of the page and get the appropriate URL. The aggregator could then get the comments feeds and use them to produce the features outlined above.

Johan of Ecmanaut has pointed out on a couple occasions that Blogger’s ‘default’ comment permalink URL was POSTURL#cCOMMENTID. I had never found much proof of this claim, except for some default code in the blogger templates — but some of them (like the one mine is based off of) actually have the anchor that works set to the above, and the links themselves set to #COMMENID with no ‘c’… confusing that.

In some recent work I did on the XOXO Blog and in the creation of the Commentosphere Userscript I found out something very disturbing — this discrepancy extends beyond the template codes! Johan’s claim stems from the fact that the anchors on comment pages (those ugly things I partly avoid by my inline comments form) use the #cCOMMENTID format, and hence his commentblogging script (and my commentosphere script) both pull in this format when passing data to del.icio.us or commentosphere, respectively.

There is, however, a Blogger template tag (<$BlogCommentPermalinkURL$>) that is meant to output the entire permalink of a comment (including posturl), something I’ve been looking for for awhile to alleiviate the need for the ugly JavaScript hackery I have in my blog template to facilitate the same. This template tag, however, outputs using the #COMENTID format! If this isn’t confusing I don’t know what is — which one is standard, Blogger?

For now, I would reccomend using both. How? Change your comment anchor to read something like <a id=”c<$BlogCommentNumber$>” name=”<$BlogCommentNumber$>”> </a>.

I posted before about how some people are posting their comments to del.icio.us. At that time I said that I thought the idea good, but would far prefer it if there were a service dedicated to this use, for reasons I listed. After some discussion on the subject, and seeing more and more how useful content is sometimes lost because it is in a comment somewhere, I decided to try my hand at implementing the idea myself.

So, using Ning as the hosting and codebase, I have developed Commentosphere. Yes, it’s a tacky name, if you have another suggestion I’m more than open to it 😉 Developing on Ning was an interesting first-time experiance, on which I plan to write a post later. Currently posting to the service is handled primarily by a bookmarklet available on the about page or the posting page, but I hope eventually to have some greasmonkey script’s based off of Johan of Ecmanaut‘s script for del.icio.us. You must have a Ning account to add comments to the service.

For those people who have been tagged their comments on del.icio.us I have included an importer. Having, however, no comment data on del.icio.us myself I have not been able to properly test it, so feedback on this feature would be greatly appreciated!

Comments may be filtered by tag, user, what post they are on, what blog they are on, what parents they have (more on that below), or any combination of these. They are also fully searchable. Tag intersections do not work yet, but I am trying to fix that. Syndication is possible via RSS 2.0 or JavaScript (for inclusion in a blog sidebar, see mine) and there is a JavaScript Feed Generation tool. Other formats (including JSON) should be coming soon.

Comments are semi-threaded on Commentosphere. It works like this: when adding a comment you can specify the permalink URLs of one or more comments that this comment is a reply to. When viewing that comment in the app these ‘parent’ comments are listed and linked to. A link to ‘child’ comments is presented and, if clicked, will bring up a page of all comments who have that comment set as their parent. Multiple parents is currently a tag buggy, but that should be fixed soon.

Last but not least is the aggregator. The aggregator lets you add posts, blogs, tags, and users to monitor for comments. When a new comment is added to Commentosphere for any item you monitor, it will be added to your aggregator. For off-Commentosphere comments you have the option of adding an RSS comments feed that will also have its content mixed into the page. The page may itself be syndicated via RSS to allow you to monitor comments from blogs across the web without cluttering your reader with all the innumerable feeds. The aggregator currently has a known bug in that it does not sort the items in any way, and thus they end up chrological, but grouped by source. This is obviously not the desired behaviour and I am working to correct this.

And that, in a (large) nutshell, is it. More information can be found on the about page or the tips page. Testing and feedback on all features (especially the del.icio.us importer) would be greatly appreciated.

Tags: Comments del.icio.us delicious Syndication Ning Commentosphere

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