I started reading blogs regularly at http://weblogs.asp.net a few months ago and got hooked - I enjoy reading ideas, thoughts, advice, and rants from fellow ASP.NET developers and am subscribed to many RSS feeds. From my understanding, the main motivation for blogs is two-fold: to serve as an expressive outlet for the blogger, and to build community, by creating a somewhat social and familiar atmosphere among individuals who share a common interest.
Clearly, a community grows best when all of its members can actively participate in a discussion. While a blog is primarily a one-way communication medium - that is, the blogger posts his statements for the world to read - the experience is often enhanced by allowing those who read the blog to leave feedback in the form of comments, that all can view and respond to.
Unfortunately, the user experience for comments in a blog leaves much to be desired (at least in the blogs I've visited, which are a cross-section of many blogging engines). The features that are missing, in order of importance, are:
- Lack of accounts, meaning you have to re-enter your information (yes, I know many blog systems use cookies to remember your username/email/URL/etc., but if you use different computers often, or different browsers, it can be a pain). Furthermore, due to the nature of cookies, each blog site requires you to re-enter this information.
- Lack of the ability to respond to a particular post. Personally, I love threaded discussions (a la Slashdot/Kuro5hin/ASPMessageboard.com/etc.). It's a little annoying to have one long list of posts, not being able to tell if one post is a response to another.
- Lack of notification when someone replies to your comment. The only way today to determine if someone has responded to one of your comments is to recheck the blog entry's comment page. This is annoying. Ideally, one could opt to receive emails when someone replied to one of their posts, or there could be an RSS feed that individual users could subscribe to in order to see their posts and who has responded.
- Lack of rich formatting of a comment. While I don't necessarily want people to be able to insert HTML that can negatively effect the layout of the site, why can't I use bold tags or italics to emphasis a word or phrase in my comment? Also, every blog system should auto-convert URLs to HREFs, or at least allow the HTML <a> tag in the post body.\
While clearly threaded discussions and rich-formatting could be applied to blogging engines on an engine-by-engine basis, notifications and accounts would need to be managed globally somehow, so that my notifications and account would travel with me, from one blog to another.
This is a tall order, obviously, and I don't have an answer for how this could realistically be implemented. What would be the benefit (read, revenue stream) for the implementor? Would blog readers use such a service? Would blog engine writers add support for such a service into their software?
Since these “global” features may be pie-in-the-sky fantasy for now, let's instead focus on what can be accomplished in the present: blog engine software makers adding richer comment support, so as to support threaded discussions and richer comments. Why don't I see these basic features in blog comment systems today? They are present in many Web sites (like Slashdot), so why not blogs?