I first touched upon this a while ago when I called it the ‘interest feed‘, and JP recently got me going again with his posts about customer perspective. In theory this is the type of problem that could be addressed by ‘synopsys‘, but some deeper digging is making me think that things are worse than they first appeared.

I though I’d have a go at brute forcing a part of the problem. Each time a wrote a comment on somebody else’s blog, I’d subscribe to the comments feed and put it into a group in my aggregator called ‘comments watch’. That way I wouldn’t miss out as the conversation developed. So far it’s been an almost complete failure, as it turns out that very few blogging platforms support a comments subscription for a single post. The feed stock for microsubscriptions just isn’t there.

I feel a nasty cludge coming along.

What does the rest of the world do about this? Do people making comments just shoot their mouth off and move on? Or do folk obsessively (and manually) return to where they’ve been before (and I can’t help thinking of my West Highland Terrier as I write this)?