keeping up with comments

Back in the early days of emerging church conversation, a lot of the talk was in email discussion groups, like yahoogroups. Nowadays, it seems that most of it occurs in blogs.

When dj chuang and I had lunch some days ago, I was complaining to him about blogger's lack of comment notification and let him know I was considering moving to Wordpress. There's a great Wordpress hack (if it's not this one, it's like it) that lets commentors opt into automatic emails whenever a comment is added to a blogpost on which they've commented. Scot McKnight has this installed at Jesus Creed.

dj helpfully turned me on to cocomment, and I spent some time this morning playing with it. It's pretty cool but not everything that I'd like. It let's the person who signs up be easily notified whenever someone comments on posts on which they've commented, but it doesn't let blog owners in blogger offer this to readers. Each reader would have to sign up for cocomment themselves to take advantage of it.

I registered and while I can't offer this service to my readers, at least I can keep up with all the discussion on blogposts on which I've commented without having to revisit a blog to check and see if there's been any additional conversation. I can either go to a special cocomment page or - even better - my page has an rss feed and I can track all my comments using bloglines (my aggregator of choice).

I'd actually rather stick with blogger, so I'm hoping that blogger beta will add this functionality, or that I'll find a blogger hack that will let me offer this as a service to my readers.

If anyone has any suggestions as to the easiest way for me to enable my readers to opt into getting email notifications of future comments to blogposts on which they comment, I'd love to hear them.