Stephen at Singpolyma has some thoughts about using feedreaders for comment aggregation:

I am proposing a simple piece of standard markup. Most blogs that have comments feeds for every post have a link to that feed somewhere on the post page. If we made it standard protocol to set rel="alternate comments" (obviously, just like with relTag, you can have other things in the rel-list as well, but require both of these) for these links, the aggregators could pull them out of the page and get the appropriate URL.

The idea is that if you subscribe to a blog, your reader could be made to see new comments as well as new posts, and could show you the whole conversation. An interesting & provocative thought, and one that automates comment aggregation. Right now, there are tools that exist to collect my comments elsewhere, (but that requires me to bookmark each one) and there are a few ways to cobble together a comment feed, (but that creates a subscription to comments that are detached from their posts, and can sometimes "float" in mid-air for a while as you try to pin them to the post that they reference.) Perhaps this is a "Feedburner" possibility? They've already added significant "offsite" functionality to each post with Feedflare....

Filed in: comments, comment-feeds, blogtech, webtech