This is what I want: an RSS Reader that aggregates content into the format of a forum. Each post is its own topic, and the reader keeps track of comments such that when a post gets new comments, it gets bumped up the list and lights up. If I’ve read all the comments, the post gets greyed out and slowly sinks under the posts getting comments. As the user, I obviously choose which blogs are aggregated in ‘my’ forum, and which blogs go in which categories (although a really slick version would sort based on post flags and categories using rules I set up).
Maybe I’m just not using my own feed reader (NetNewsWire) correctly, but while I get to read the initial post of the hundred-plus blogs I follow, I only see the comments that are already there when I read the post. I don’t have any good way to keep track of comments and participate in the resulting discussions. This I would like to fix.
Has somebody done this already, or is there some way to jigger an existing feed reader to do this?
There’s a trend (slow at this point) toward centralized commenting systems like Disqus, which aggregate all the comments together so that you can get emails when new comments come in. Blogger does something similar. I’m not sure if either exposes the ‘new comments’ as a feed, though, and they’re useful only for those blogs that have adopted them.
But what you want isn’t currently available, and probably isn’t possible. RSS 2.0 feeds can have a section in each that points to the page for viewing the comments, but said page isn’t guaranteed to be in any format; it’s usually an HTML form where you can post a new comment and read what others have said, and not a machine-readable format (like RSS or Atom). So there’s not a way to auto-discover the comments per item.
Even if there was, each item has its own comments feed, so you’d have to make a HTTP GET per item, so the software would run about as fast as Prudence can.
September 14th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Huh. So what are the “Comments (RSS)” links I see on WordPress blogs?
September 14th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Some blogs do have “all comments” feeds, which I suppose you could use to simplify matters, but it’d only work on blog systems that support it (not sure how many do) and make it autodiscoverable (probably most of them that do). So now every time you load your feed list you’re loading two feeds, which wouldn’t be too difficult. So theoretically you might be able to work it out.
Along this vein, take a look at Fever: http://feedafever.com/
September 14th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
You should try Google Waaaait that’s not out yet, never mind. Okay, when it comes out, and is broadly adopted, and has a vibrant developer market with all kinds of import-export gadgets to connect to many normal blogs, then it may be just what we’re looking for.
Google Reader actually does everything you just said, with the severe that only people who you specifically invite are the members of your personal forum. So if I share a livejournal post, my friends can have a lively discussion, but we aren’t notified when people post comments on whatever.livejournal.com. So it actually doesn’t do what you said. Sorry.
September 15th, 2009 at 7:21 am
It seems like this sort of functionality is more dependent upon the blog/news site than the reader. Some blogs let you subscribe to all postings on the site as well as all comments (I think these are the “Comments (RSS)” feeds you’ve seen). Others let you subscribe to comments on a particular post after you’ve read the original post, but generally you have to go to the page for that post: you can’t get to it from your reader’s version of the page.
And unfortunately LJ’s interaction with RSS remains severely limited.
September 16th, 2009 at 1:59 am