How do you keep track of comments you’ve posted to other people’s blogs? I’ll comment on something, forget to check back for a couple of days, then find out that there was actually a discussion going on I would have liked to have been a part of if I had known it was happening.
Blog comments are less private than email, but harder to keep track of than newsgroups or other public discussion forums.
Well, that’s one thing that’s easier with LJ vs. blogs. You get email notification whenever someone comments on a post of yours, and you also get email notification when someone posts a reply to a comment you made. There are some comment programs for blogs that say they do the same thing, but half the time, even if I check the box that says “notify me if someone replies” I don’t get any notification.
So, you know, my answer is, switch to LJ ;-). No, seriously, I don’t know how else to deal with it–I do lose track of comments I’ve made in blogs.
This problem is why I haven’t been too speedy about updating my own blog and adding a comment function. If I do, it’s going to have some very specific options.
First, it’ll have a “notify” by email option like LJ does. That’s come in handy when someone posts a comment to my LJ blog, but no such function exists for syndicated feeds – so if anyone replies within LJ to the sybdicated feed after it’s cycled out of the top twenty posts in my “friends” list I lose out on the conversation. That’s annoying.
Second, it’ll have a way for me to reply to the blog comment thread BY EMAIL. I find it bothersome to have to go to a bazillion different blogs and reply if I want to participate in conversations. Even on LJ, if I reply to the notify email, I’m replying by email to that one person who posted and folks seem to like the public thread feel of comment threads on a blog. So, I’ll add a function that lets me reply privately by email or publically to the blogspace by email.
I’m just an email kinda gal I guess. :-)