Tony from Geekwhat was talking last week about whether RSS readers kill reader involvement, and I have to agree with him. In fact I have a problem with the whole blog commenting system at the moment.

The idea of comments is to allow readers to discuss the post with other readers and the writer right? Then how come so few sites facilitate this? Think about the last time you wanted to comment on a blog. Here's what you probably do (it's what I do):

• read the interesting post in a RSS reader (gReader's my current reader of choice).
  
• decide you want to check out the comments and want to add your own, so you right-click on the link and open the post in a new tab/window.
• finish reading the rest of your RSS feeds for the day because you don't want to break your reading mood/flow. End up with a heap of tabs/windows of interesting articles.
• go through each one and try to remember what you wanted to say in each post, read the existing comments, and add in your comment (or maybe you have to sign in too, which I hate and I've never signed up for a site just to comment - if Engadget, one of the busiest blogs, can do it without signups, other sites can too).

That's too hard. Hard enough for some readers to just not bother. And if you did bother, that's probably where it ends. But think back to the purpose of commenting - to allow readers to discuss the post. Are you discussing, or just butting in then disappearing? The good blog sites out there keep you in the loop by emailing you whenever a new comment is posted on that post (clearly not mine because I don't offer that , but it is coming , and also there's a WordPress addon that does this for people using WordPress), but that's inappropriate on busy blogs like Engadget. Other sites offer a RSS feed for the comments, but that's a ridiculous idea right now - a) we have go to the effort of adding the RSS feed to our readers, b) our readers just aren't made to handle comment RSS feeds; I comment a bit on other people's blogs, and there's no way I want to see my gReader filled up with comment RSS feeds from each of those blog posts, which are out of context too because the post itself is not in the feed.

Blog comments right now aren't particularly conducive to continuing the discussion. It just takes too much effort to do so, even with email and RSS comment feeds. There have been so many sites that I've commented on which I've intended to revisit but can't because I've lost the link and can't be bothered searching through the tens of feeds I read to find it again.

The solution? Check out this mockup of gReader.

(Yes thank you, I know my mockup skills are awesome . There's no significance in Ben Metcalfe's blog being there, it just happened to be the first on my list because he's blog title starts with a colon, sneaky bastard.)

I think there should be new properties in the feeds that contain a link to the each post's comment RSS feed and the number of comments on it at the moment. So let's say I'm in gReader and I'm reading a post. It was interesting to me and I wanted to know what other people thought about it, so I click on the "x comments" button (where x is the number of comments at the moment) at the bottom of each post and the new comments pane slides into place and loads up all the comments, in the same dynamically loaded style as the blog posts themselves. I agree with some, and disagree with others, so I decide to put my perspective there - tap the special hotkey or press the button and the comment form appears, allowing me to enter my comments and add them. As soon as I added them, it shows me the message the blog sent back, saying 'thanks for the comment, it is currently in the moderation queue' or whatever, and automatically adds that post's comment feed to my Comments feeds folder.

A couple hours later, I revisit gReader (admit it, it's addictive - it's like the Crackberry for feeds) and at the top of my feeds list is the folder that says "Commented posts (1)". Under that folder it shows me the post that I commented on has gotten a new comment - only posts with new comments will appear here of course. I can then click it and it'll not only show me the comments, but also the original blog post so I can quickly recall the context of the discussions. I reply and the cycle begins again.

Now that is a much better blog commenting experience. What's needed to make it happen? One of the buzzwords of web 2.0 - APIs. There should be a standard API for comments, just like there's one for blogging (i.e. submitting blog posts) - the MetaBlog API. Doesn't have to be fancy, just a simple standard API that's implemented in all the cool blogging platforms, like the MetaBlog API. Come on, with the leadership that's been shown with OpenID, the MetaBlog API and Ping/Trackbacks, surely it can't be too hard to do the same with comments.

There also needs to be some slight changes to the RSS 2.0 spec. Currently for each item there is an optional Comments attribute that can contain a link to the comments for that blog post. There should be some new ones that contains a link to the Comments RSS feed, the Comment API, and the number of comments posted. Again, simple adjustments - in fact even without changes to the official spec, this can be implemented as long as the atrribute names are agreed upon because if RSS readers don't understand an attribute, they'll just ignore it, no harm done.

And that's it. Really, it's not that big a deal, but those with the power (i.e. blogging platform companies) just don't seem to get it right now (or maybe they're too busy with OpenID).

That said, there is a cool startup out there trying improve commenting - coComment. As long as the blog you're viewing supports it (they have plugins for popular blogging platforms like Wordpress or blogger), the comment you add to that page will be linked back to your coComment account, and through their website you can see all the posts you've left comments on, and which ones have new comments. You can also aggregate your comments and get that as a widget, so you can show people where you comment. It lets you track commenters too, so if you like the comments from a particular person, you can track them and be notified when they comment next, which is the logical next step from my plan above. It even allows you to comment on pages that don't have a comment section by using its bookmarklet which routes the conversation to coComment and it continues there. And like all new web apps out there, you can see the most popular posts, blogs, tags, commenters etc. So not only does it assist your readers in discussing your post, but also promotes it. It doesn't seem to have an open API either for RSS reader developers to tap into though, which is a bummer. Still, coComment helps largely solve the 'continuing the discussion' part of the problem, and if all goes to plan you'll be seeing this when my new blog design comes out, but they don't solve the initial commenting hurdle.

How can we get the word out there that comments are important? Surely with the whole social thing that underpins 'web 2.0' someone else can see the failures in the current commenting system...

Now thinking ahead, I think there's another problem with RSS readers - are RSS readers killing good website design? Think about it - if we read all the person's posts in a reader (and comment in it), we won't need to visit the person's site anymore. RSS etiquette doesn't allow designers to style their posts in the feed, so why is design needed anymore? Not as big an issue, but one for you to ponder...

UPDATE (21/4/2007): While modding my new site to be live soon, I discovered there is in fact such a commenting API, creatively called CommentAPI. It actually addresses a lot of the issues, with an API to get comments, as well as submitting them. One downside of it however, is that it doesn't allow the blog to return a comment state once it's submitted, e.g. the blog can't tell the submitter that the comment is awaiting moderation. Still, I'm surprised it's not being implemented by any of the popular feed readers; a lot of blogs already support it.