Writing blogs is easy but when it comes to follow conversations through comments, it’s a pain. I often forgot about all the conversations I’ve started on many blogs; that’s too bad.
Sure, there are some services that helps you tracking all your blog conversations, but none of them is really convenient.
All these services have many flaws, making them totally useless in my regard. The process of subscribing to comments, get notified through RSS and replying make you navigate through different places.
But there is a system we all use to keep track of conversations: the venerable email. Gmail already organize your emails as conversations, it would be the perfect place — not to mention the fact that writing a comment in a web form is a bit of a pain; no spell checking, no draft saving.
I’d just like the comfort of email to follow and reply to blog conversations. I don’t want to go to a specific website just to do that; I don’t even want to go back to the original web site where the conversation started.
I’m thinking about implementing such service. Of course, the ideal way would be for blogging platforms to support the service instead of just email notifications but I guess providing a WordPress plugin would be a good start; WordPress has a huge market share among bloggers.
That said, I’m also wondering why the popular MyBlogLog is not providing a conversation tracking service, this is definitely their core business.
UPDATE (09-10-2007): I recently discovered Disqus, a YC-funded company that creates a dedicated forum based on your blog comments. Comments tracking is not yet a solved problem.
UPDATE (09-05-2008): Apparently, Disqus got the reply by email feature. I have good ideas sometime.
CTO at 
Comments
That sounds like a great idea. you should post that as a comment on Eric’s profile. I’m working on a contact system for my blog that worked like a threaded discussion. It will be a private thread and not public. But I like the idea of a public thread tracking system.
BeachBum
BeachBum4 September 07 at 7:06 am
sounds like a great idea for a local startup weekend
heri4 September 07 at 9:02 am
Wow! what a cool idea Fred!
Do it fast before someone else does
macournoyer4 September 07 at 10:08 am
I wonder if something like this can be achieve building upon google-searches? Their alert-systems tend to work great for me and combine well with mail.
Vincent van Wylick4 September 07 at 11:14 am
You should have a look at http://co.mments.com/ by Assaf. A great tool.
Alexis5 September 07 at 8:49 am
Thank all for your comments.
@beachbum who’s the Eric you’re mentioning?
@alexis I tried co.mments.com and I didn’t like it.
@heri why not, I think something like this can be coded pretty fast.
Frederic Brunel5 September 07 at 10:35 am
@vincent Google Alerts might be an option but the mails you receive are not really well formatted and the setup would be too complex to follow comments — I think you’ll get some garbage anyway –, thus you can’t reply unless you follow the link. This is not what I propose.
Frederic Brunel5 September 07 at 10:38 am
Great idea fred.
WordPress is a good (plugins, community) and bad solution though : you’ll have to think twice before writing a comment : “let’s see … is this a WP blog ?”
Cecil7 September 07 at 9:59 am
Actually it would be totally transparent for the comment; only the blog owner would have to think about the WordPress stuff.
Of course, since it’s not an usual habit of replying to comment by email, it would require some explanation somewhere–maybe in the email.
Fred Brunel10 September 07 at 9:38 pm
[...] includes a built-in social network with profiles. Tracking conversation over multiple blog can be a pain, but with more and more people joining the Disqus network, I can track them right from the Disqus [...]
Switching to Disqus-Fred Brunel19 August 08 at 12:19 pm
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