Just a quick note, but this is something that drives me nuts as a blogger.
Blogging is, of course, far more than just writing posts, opening posts up to comments, and commenting on comments. Blogging is also about interaction within the blogosphere. I would say that most, if not all, of us venture out beyond the “borders” of our our own blogs. Bloggers read other blogs (duh!) and comment on posts made in other blogs. Since this is part of the flow of our thinking, why is it that someone has not created something where we, on the face of our own blogs, reveal to the users/readers of our blogs, our interactions and continued flow of thoughts in comments and interactions on other blogs? To me, this is an integral part of the culture of blogging (not to mention a no-brainer considering hypertext theory)!
It just seems like a widget can be developed to look something like the widget we have to show recent comments made on our blog.
Hey WordPress.com company people, can we do anything to make this happen?! Sure would be a nice addition to both the experience of those who blog AND to those who read the blogs!
Harry Smeltzer
January 22, 2009
Robert,
Good idea – have you sent it in to WordPress? I have been using the My Comments feature to track my comments on other WordPress.com blogs. It saves me time when I’m looking for a response from you, for example.
cenantua
January 22, 2009
Harry,
No, but I’m about to send it their way. Maybe if we all swamp them en masse with a barrage of e-mails with this idea…
Yes, that “My Comments” feature is good, but we need to break free from the limitations of only seeing things within WordPress.com World. Not only that, but the readers need to be able to have the ability to see what we we have to say as we “yack” on other blogs. I find that, in several instances, discussion elsewhere is a carry-over from discussion on our own blogs. Of course, when I “yack” about something elsewhere in a comment on another blog, I sometimes end up creating a post that expand on my comments placed elsewhere. Seems that tweaking this thing should be possible to make the overall blogging interaction more dynamic.
Drew W.
January 22, 2009
That’s a good idea. Blogger is unfortunately even farther behind than WordPress in this regard.
Jim Beeghley
January 23, 2009
A lot of blogs have a method to subscribe to comments via RSS so if I really want to follow the comments then I’ll add them to my RSS reader.
Or, like this one, I’ll click the notify via email.
Jim
cenantua
January 23, 2009
Hi Jim,
Yes, but there should be a widget to make this a widespread practice within the blogosphere. I think a widget should be made to display on a blog, the activities of the blogger in blogs elsewhere, much in the same way that the widget exist for “Recent Comments” within the blog. The WordPress.com has responded and said they would add it to their list of suggestions, so we’ll see what happens.
Harry Smeltzer
January 23, 2009
Jim,
I gotta admit, the RSS thing baffles me. I know there should be a way to add an icon so someone can just click it, but I’m not sure how to do it. There is a text link in my Meta to the right. But when I want to add someone to my Google feed reader, I just copy their url and go to the reader and add them. When I open IE, I have four homepages set, including my blog and my reader, and the tab to the reader updates with unread posts in parenthesis. So I always know when someone has posted something new.