Steve Rubel declares dead the idea that blog links as a measure of authority.

There is a very easy and fast way to measure the influence and importance of a blog: the possibility to comment.

If you are invited to do so and you can do it the easiest way, then it is a low frequented blog.

Even more if the owner personally writes back thanking and commenting your comment.

If you have to register before commenting, that means they have a lot of comments and consider them bothering, so making it more difficult is a way of politely discouraging it.

There are even places where they openly declare annoying to receive comments and, since they were too many, they decided to stop it.

THOSE are the BLOGS.

Too bad they are no fun anymore. Talking is one of the few funs of life, inferior only to discussing.

For me the valuable blogs are the provocative ones, the ones you cannot resist to comment, the ones that invite you to.

For me THOSE are the BLOGS.

Links or no links. I read and comment for fun, not for links.

I blog for fun and NOT as a job.

I pity the ones who have the JOB to BLOG.

Patrizia

http://woip.blogspot.com

Feature request:

I just posted a comment to a blog, but that blog has moderated comments. Because of this, my comment has not appeared yet. I would like to monitor that blog post, but there aren’t any comments up there yet. When I enter the URL for this blog entry, I get the error:

Sorry, but I can’t read comments from this page.

And it don’t think I can force it to add it? There should be a button to force monitor it, in anticipation for a comment to appear later.

I’m new to co.mments and enjoying it — I also think that this method of using WordPress to do discussion is intriguing; an open blog! First time on a site I’ve seen that.

Is there a way to make suggestions for comment site compatibility?

For example, I’d like to track comments on the Filter Forge forums, but it gives me the “Sorry, I can’t read comments from this page” error message. I’d also like to see support for popular systems like Livejournal, which doesn’t seem to be recognized. Interestingly, Vox, which is also a service of Six Apart, appears to work.
What would also be helpful is if there was already an established list of sites that are compatible with co.mments. It wouldn’t have to be all-encompassing, but provide a useful overview.

How does anyone else feel about this? I’ll be tracking the comments on this post (update: oh rats, looks like I can’t appear to, the irony!) and I look forward to your insights. Thanx!

I’m wondering if, for instance, a Wordpress plug-in might ever happen, or a Firefox extension? I realize that there are ways to use co.mments in Wordpress and Firefox, but honestly - they’re too much trouble for most people. Anything that requires remembering to do something every time one comments on a blog isn’t going to work for the average user.

However, something like a Firefox extension that automatically sets up tracking of comments every time the user posts a comment on any compatible blog&emdash;that’s nice and easy.

Installing a plug-in on a Wordpress blog is something just about any blogger can do&emdash;but ask most of them to actually edit their templates and you’re all too likely to see a look of sheer terror.

The Sociable plug-in has so MANY different “submit this to” options that the fact that co.mments is one of them is irrelevant - it just disappears in the forest of logos.

I’m not a programmer, but plug-in and extension development doesn’t seem to be rocket science. Surely it could be managed? I’m making my sites friendly to that other service, and I’d really like to be even-handed.

Thanks!

Would it be possible to have an option to automatically remove or archive conversations after a certain time with no comments. Maybe this could be user configurable - XX days.

Some users might not want or need it at all, but for me its pretty safe to assume that if they haven’t had any new comments in, say, a week or two then there probably won’t be any new ones. I’m just imagining my Conversations page becoming pretty huge after a time.

Or alternatively, maybe they could be “archived” in some way. Put on a seperate “archives” page, and maybe only checked once a week or so.

any chance co.mments could track forum posts too?

I tend to post on a lot of blogs, for which it works great, but also a number of forums (for which it doesn’t work at all).

For example: voodoo extreme on ign: http://ve3dboards.ign.com/message.asp?topic=26215973

I’d guess a lot of forums use standard code.. so i’d think it wouldn’t be too hard. (though they do often take you to a second page to post, dunno if thats a problem).

I recently reviewed three comment tracking systems and co.mments was my personal winner. It was able to track all comments except for my own blog which uses a non common comment system written by me.

I read a little bit into the different microformats that are currently in the wild to markup comments and want to add one of them into my tool. The question is which of these formats does co.mments understand? If multiple, which is preferred?

To me the non-official mfComment format looks most complete and sane. Is it supported by co.mments?

Randy Morin uses his own custom blogging platform, and his comment markup is pretty, um, different. Would it be possible to add support for tracking comments on his sites? For example, try any post on http://www.kbcafe.com/rss

On SOB, individual posts get the names of the categories used as the title by co.mments. I think this stems from apotheon’s formatting of the categories within a div of class-name “post-title”. Is co.mments using a regex to scrape the title that’s maybe a little too loose? Something like <.*title.*>? Example post: http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=182, where the title comes out as “Metalog& Geek 16 Jan 2007 07:53 pm”.

It seems that the blogs hosted at blogia.com, i.e. diariodelabecaria, or leetamargo, or many others ar not correctly parsed and the comments either are not found, or only the name of commenter