I was complaining about blog comments a while ago, and while I still haven't found an RSS reader that let's me read/submit comments with the post together (even though I found APIs that support that), I've found a way to keep up with comments on blogs. Check out blogflux's commentful service, which keeps track of comments on blogs you specify so you don't have to.

Once you've completed the simple registration procedure (only your name and email address), click on the 'usage' button and add the bookmarklet to your browser's links bar. You should get something that looks like this on your browser:

Now every time you browse to a blog post that you want to track comments for, regardless of whether you've posted a comment or not, click the 'Add to Commentful' button you just added. A message will come up telling you its been added, before showing the original page again.

There are three options as to how you can be notified:

• via the watchlist page - whenever you click the 'Add to commentful' button, the link to that blog post is added to the watchlist. You can view your watchlist by navigating to commentful and clicking the My watchlist button, where it will list all the added posts with new comments, as well as options to stop tracking them. Not the most helpful if you want to be notified as soon as possible, unless you constantly refresh.
  
• via the watchlist RSS feed - similar to above, except the info is delivered to your RSS reader. Again, good for when you just want to see what's happening, but not if you want to be engaged in a near-real-time conversation, unless you keep your RSS reader open 24/7.
• via the Firefox extension - this adds a new item in Firefox's status bar (bottom) that looks like this:
  
  And when you have new comments to read, it changes to this:
  
  Clicking on it will open the commentful watchlist in a new tab. If you right click, the button 'turns off', so I assume that means it won't notify you of any new comments so you won't be disturbed - not sure though.
  
  This is the best option if you want to be notified as soon as possible.
  

Effectively, what it does is monitor the pages you tell it to (every 15 minutes I'm told), and when something changes, it checks it for new comments using some detection algorithm, and if there are, it notifies you. I've tested it with Wordpress and Blogger blogs, and it works great, correctly detecting the number of comments as well. It should work with a whole lot of other ones too, see here. If a blogger has enabled moderation, when the blogger releases your comment, commentful will detect it as a new comment - tiny annoyance, but unavoidable for commentful.

When the post doesn't have new comments for 30 days, it gets relegated to the 'archived links' section, and won't be checked for comments unless requested, uncluttering your watchlist view.

I've been using this service for a week and a bit now, and it's been great not having to check back on posts to see if someone has commented or not. It's non-intrusive, works across a wide range of blogs, and does a great job filling in the short-comings of many blogs/blog platforms. Of course, there are some things it can do better, including the possibility of being notifed via email, and the firefox extension detecting when I'm submitting a comment form and adding the post automatically to commentful. An optional bigger alert when there's new comments may be good too, as I don't glance at my status bar that often.

For someone who sees blog comments as a conversation with other readers rather than a one-way submission, this is a great tool. In fact, because it's so easy to use, I find that I'm keeping track of comments a lot more than I used to when I just left the posts open in a firefox tab and occasionally refreshed them until I got bored.