Fixing blog comment tracking
November 25th, 2007
Tracking blog comments is still painful, even after all the years since blogging became mainstream. The most important concept behind blogging seems to be forgotten by the available platforms, which provide only comment RSS or at most email notifications.
There’s a recent wave of web sites trying to solve this problem using a very strange approach, while their whole business plan assumes that tracking blog comments will always be a pain. Yes, I’m talking about coComment.com and co.mments.com. They basically let you “bookmark” a post and monitor it for you. Of course this doesn’t always work, since there is no standard way to do it.
Yet another “player” here seems to be disqus.com, whose solution is not so technically questionable, but is still not very practical. You basically “outsource” comment management for your blog to a forum you create on their website. Your blog engine will use their API to post comments in that forum, which can be monitored by other disqus users. The first problem I see here is that you can not track comments made on blogs that don’t use their system. This is a chicken and egg problem. Why would I use them to track comments when there is nothing I can track? And why would I use them for my blog’s comments when nobody is using them for tracking?
Here is an easy to implement solution I have been thinking about. As in disqus’s approach let the blog engine “ping” somebody when a new comment is posted. The difference is that it should ping an URL provided by the commenter. The most obvious provider of such URLs would be online feed readers - since you use them to track new posts why not use them also for comments? Blogging platforms themselves could also implement the “receiver” part of this API, so you could track comments you make in your blog’s administration section.
Of course, nobody would gain from implementing this except the end user. Maybe that’s why people rush to create workarounds instead of solving the real problem.
Feed
Chee Ming said:
Interesting but I thought the problem was that comment systems end up getting spam. What’s wrong with comment RSS and e-mail notifications? I guess unless you get lots of comments its not really a problem. I just checked out disqus.com’s tour and I do see some benefits of having threaded conversations and all sorts of other goodies. But seems like an overkill to me! :)
And those systems are trying to “steal” content from blogs!
Ionuţ Bizău said:
Spam is not such a big problem; Akismet seems to solve that pretty well.
Comment RSS is bad because 1) you need to subscribe to one additional feed for every site you want to track, which clutters your reader and 2) you get the comments for *every post*, not only the ones you are interested in. Email is not bad for notification, but it’s not so good for passing structured data. It’s like subscribing to blog posts via email vs using feeds. You can do much more with the feeds once you have them.
Imagine a feed reader that has the ability to receive the “comment pings” I mentioned - it would be able to display the whole conversation in one place, starting from where I got interested in it.
Josh said:
Hi Ionut,
I think you should check out Intense Debate as well. We are the most feature rich of the new comment systems and we are still a young service. Expect many more good things from us, including in the sphere of comment tracking. Currently each commenter has an RSS feed assigned to their comments that anyone can subscribe to.
We definitely don’t steal content from the publisher’s site. Our focus is keeping people on the publisher’s site longer and our early indications say as much. Great article.
Ionuţ Bizău said:
Josh,
IntenseDebate looks good, but from what I see it’s not very different from Disqus. Basically you can not use it to track comments on blogs that don’t use it. Is that right?
Now imagine what the user’s experience will be like when both you and Disqus become popular enough - people will need two accounts to track their comments - one on each site. Why not make it easy for the user from the beginning?
Maura McNulty said:
What a timely post, just this past week I discovered Disgus and Cocomments. My challenge as a PR consultant who’s tracking blogs for clients, flagging posts for comments and sometimes posting those comments for someone else, is that these systems pick up my email address, and won’t let me post comments under another client email address. I need a commet tracking system and I’m not technical so I can’t write my own, I look forward to your future discussion and suggestions on this topic.
Idetrorce said:
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
Ionuţ Bizău said:
It would be nice to hear your opinion.
Humanware » Blog Archive » Blogs as social networks said:
[…] using feeds. But blogs are still in their infancy - we don’t even have a uniform way of tracking comments! I predict that blogging will evolve in a way that will make it a good alternative distributed […]