While comments have been around for a long time on the web, they’re still under-utilized. There is no simple way for me to track comments that I leave at various sites. Currently, I may be able to receive notification via email of new comments or subscribe to comments via RSS. Email seems like overkill, but it might also be the simplest of these solutions. RSS is great, but I wouldn’t really want comments feeds clogging my already-full feed-reader.
There is also the option of revisiting web pages where I have left a comment, but I still have the problem of remembering which pages to visit. Perhaps a bookmark, or better yet a bookmarking tool would do the trick. Note that this is not an automated solution like the above. I would still have to visit these pages individually and note manually whether comments were added since my last visit.
In September, I was struck with what I thought was a wonderfully simple solution. Most sites upon which I would leave a comment currently have an RSS feed. If feed owners had unique identifiers for every subscriber, they could track which comments I want to follow. Then, those threads could be added to my already-existing, rolled-just-for-me feed.
I sat on this idea and it’s a good thing. Brad Feld has some excellent reasons not to do this. To summarize his thoughts, it basically comes down to personalized feeds becoming uncacheable by RSS readers.
Of course, caching isn’t a new problem for the web. Many old browsers, in an effort to help us dialup users of the internet’s past, showed cached versions of pages unless we took drastic measures. I used to empty my cache multiple times per day and now I don’t even remember the last time I had to do it. Still, there’s the issue of big providers like AOL caching at the server level.
But now caching is helpful with aggregating RSS feeds. As Brad mentions, if unique identifiers are used, the server load for both publisher and aggregator increase. I do wonder how much more traffic we’re talking. Feeds only contain the content, leaving the images and other design elements out (which helps with the download “weight”). Still, if aggregators are pinging hourly to see whether the feed it new, that could add up.
As Brad ends his post, so shall I. There’s got to be a better approach.
On my blog I offer both an RSS for the post comments, as well as an email notification. People do seem to use the email notification.
I use Google Reader as my aggrigator, so I simply “star” posts that I want to keep up with the comments on, then check them out later to see if there has been any response. Though, I too wish there was an easier way.
If there was a way to perhaps add a note on the title of a post when there’s new unread comments saying something like “new comments,” that would be helpful.
I have no idea how (or if) that could be done though.