Just noticing in my Bloglines feeds that each post now has a link to the trackbacks and comments associated with it. Cool…another good way to identify the “hotspots” of conversation that are taking place. These links jump outside of Bloglines to the places where the conversation is actually occuring on the source blogs.
Now, there are some folks who have had issues with Bloglines aggregation. The idea that an aggregator could do a comprehensive pull of an entire feed’s contents, and then repurpose that content (say, by potentially wrapping advertising around it) is an interesting issue. This discussion may get even thornier down the line if Bloglines decides to not only provide links to the comments and trackbacks, but spider them and pull them into their own environment as well. Stay tuned on this one.
Update:
It looks like this is actually a function of the Brandshift RSS feed, and not Bloglines. Still very cool.
Hi Chris
I agree. On my own site I’ve created some optional feeds – one with full comments and trackbacks, a separate comment feed, as well as incorporating the trackback id in the regular feed.
(Some users don’t like the comment count in the regular feed as it marks the entry as refreshed each time a comment is added. I think some readers treat refreshed feeds just like new entries.)
I think creating choice for readers is a good idea. I find it a bit of a bore having to go clicking to find a trackback id for posts I read in Sharpreader.
I was just thinking yesterday about all the various feeds and how my membership in 3rd party sites like Flickr and 43 Things creates even more feeds related to what I’m doing.
It made me think about being able to have a “superfeed” of some sort that could aggregate, in one subscription, a person’s participation across their own blog and 3rd party sites. I wonder if something like that exists? Or should exist?
Lee, I think Feedburner may have a “splicing” function that does something like this. Link:
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/000660.html