Why I enjoy adding comments
I enjoy adding comments on other people’s blogs as much as seeing comments on my blog.
It is thrilling to watch the conversation shift from blogger to commenter #1 to commenter #2 to blogger to commenter #3 to commenter #2 to commenter #4 to blogger and back again.
You can see this back-and-forth action in the reactive comments to my recent advice, 3 Tips to Keep Me Commenting On Your Blog.
When I leave a comment on someone’s blog, it’s usually in response to something the blogger wrote or something another commenter left. I always opt to follow the conversation when I leave the page by checking a box to subscribe by email. I prefer email over RSS for comments because of the instantaneous notification and threaded style of GMail.
Blogs are not equal with comment tracking
Every Blogger-hosted blog includes per-post email notification by default.
Every Wordpress blog includes the option of installing a plugin to offer this service. I use the Subscribe to Comments plugin developed by Mark Jaquith.
But Typepad bloggers are still writing in the dark ages. Take a look at the bottom of a recent post by Steve Rubel praising the new Typepad Connect commenting platform that Six Apart created:
If I didn’t return to the page, I’d never Steve responded.
I know what you might say: Ari, why don’t you subscribe to Steve’s comment feed?
You can see the RSS icon in the right sidebar, offering me a comment feed subscription. But that’s for every comment on every post Steve writes. I don’t need to see every comment; I only care about comments subsequent to mine on a per-post basis, not for every post.
To be fair, Steve fails to implement a per-post RSS feed that fellow Typepad blogger Beth Kanter does. You can see this in action in Beth’s latest post about Thanksgiving.
But my point remains: Despite Six Apart’s frequently asked question about Typepad web feeds and answer that there are no per-post subscription options other than RSS, how does the company respond when Blogger and Wordpress do offer that ability?
You can imagine my frustration when I added comments earlier today on blog posts by Peter Kim on Working Backwards to the Future and Jim Benson on Twitter Makes Me Hungry.
But wait. Denise Wakeman of the Blog Squad provided 3 tips to track comments on Typepad blogs:
- Commentful: www.commentful.com – works with Mozilla Firefox browser via a Firefox extension
- co.mments: http://co.mments.com – load a bookmarklet into IE, Safari, or Firefox.
- coComment: www.cocomment.com – least amount of effort to track your blogging conversations. Create a free account and download a Firefox extension.
I don’t own a Typepad blog so I can’t say whether her 15-month-old advice still works. Maybe there’s a newer solution.
It’s not my place to tell any content creator how to run his or her blog, for I don’t fault the blogger. I do lay blame on Six Apart, creators of Typepad, for failing to include a universal standard that every other blog platform offers: the ability for a reader to subscribe by email to a blog post.
Thoughts?
Thank you for returning to my blog! If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, email delivery, or Kindle subscription. You may also reach me on Twitter @ariherzog.
Related posts:
- Why I Love These 15 Wordpress Plugins
- Should Email Addresses Be Required in Blog Comments?
- 1 Essential Plugin for Your Wordpress Blog
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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I fully agree with you. I’ve been puzzling for months what to do about my Typepad blog (although the pistachio blog is in wordpress). I have been a loyal Typepad user for some time, but the /nofollow issue and the comment tracking issue have made me rethink.
I don’t want to use off-blog commenting because that adds yet another thing to administer. Writing for five different blogs, I just can’t deal with any more.
I like the tools my friend giyen uses though. Links to the blog, promotes most recent blog post and lets one have follow up via email.
I like your inclusion of Twitter ID as well.
Jim Benson´s last blog post..Links for 2008-11-25 [del.icio.us]
I share your frustration with blogs that for one reason or another don’t make it easy to track the conversation in comments on a specific post. Cocomment never really worked for me, for some reason – I suspect the extension may have been conflicting with some other – but haven’t tried the other two you mention, so thanks for those tips. Backtype is another option I’ve just started experimenting with: one does sometimes need to add/suggest the blogs that are commented on, as it’s apparently still building its resource base, but on the whole I like how it functions. Worth looking into, anyway?
Re: Typepad, Steve and I both have the new system implemented, Beth Kanter has the old one running. From a management side, I actually like the old system better, may switch back soon. The threading isn’t enough to overcome some other minor annoyances.
BackType and Disqus are good 3rd party systems as well, worth checking out.
Peter Kim´s last blog post..Working backwards to the future
Jim: Wasn’t Typepad an early blog platform for people wanting to write an online diary? Perhaps commenting, dofollow, and other user-friendly/SEO techniques were never considered, leading to recent measures, e.g. Typepad Connect? Good luck in your decision… and thanks for the Twitter id kudos; I realized I had a coding bug so it’s working now.
Rebecca: I don’t know about Cocomment other than by name, and Backtype is new to me, but glad to hear there are options.
Peter: Thanks for the clarification of old and new systems.
@Ari, Peter sums up the situation. I like the new features because I can easily respond to comments via email. I believe my commenters can as well. Still, it’s not perfect.
Steve Rubel´s last blog post..Zinio Inside Opens 50,000 Magazines to Searching and Sharing
Hello, I’m one of the product managers here at Six Apart. Thanks everyone for the feedback on TypePad Connect and TypePad commenting. To Ari’s comment, LiveJournal was actually the platform marketed as being an online diary.
TypePad was built to be the blog platform for both casual and professional bloggers. To that end improving commenting and community functionality is definitely a top priority for us as well as for the TypePad community. It’s not just about the blog itself but the tools available to help the blogger and their audience.
Regarding the limitations within TypePad Connect, we are still in a Beta release, which means we’ve only just started improving the commenting experience and there are lots more to come. Please keep the feedback coming and we’ll do our best to address the issues and feature requests.
Kimmie´s last blog post.."Of the Sea and Air and Sky"
Thanks for chiming in, Kimmie. I used LiveJournal 2004ish so I know what you mean by that remark.
I always equated Typepad with journalists and others who liked the Courier font. In any case, I’m glad to hear Typepad (like all things online) is experiencing puberty and will offer new features over time. I’d suggest it’s key to compete with Wordpress, especially as folks from Blogger’s platform are considering where to shift.
Ari — Hey, I also worked on the TypePad Connect project and wanted to address one issue. If you were logged in with a TypePad Profile then you would have received a notification email when Steve replied to your comment. We’re still working on bringing to this feature to users who sign in via OpenID from a provider that allows us to discover their email address via Simple Registration / Attribute Exchange extensions. There are also some concerns about providing this capability to logged-out/unverified commenters, which appears to have been the case for your comment … we want to be careful not to create an open HTTP-to-spam proxy. : )
As Kimmie mentions we take feedback very seriously and constantly use it to refine our road map. Thanks for your thoughts!
The goal here is to take a fairly non-conversational platform (a blog) and turn it into something more threaded.
I’m looking forward to seeing what six apart does in the future.
My wish list would include some traditional technorati / trackback features and (ideally) let posts that are part of the same meme somehow share comments / conversation. I want the ensuing comment based conversation to have a life beyond the post.
Jim Benson´s last blog post..Links for 2008-11-25 [del.icio.us]
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Hello,I totally agree with you. I love seeing a rapport between the commentors on each post. Not only does each comment add to the post but also adds to each other comment. Agreeing or disagreeing it takes it to a whole never level when a blog gets loads of comments. Dan,All Monster Games New from GamesMonster: Nudge
Thanks for the thoughts.
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