Using RSS for Comment Followup

I’ve blogged for a few years now, and over the time period I’ve tried a variety of methods of keeping track of comments I’ve left on other sites. I’ve tried bookmarking them in del.icio.us as well as some comment services such as coComment. I found that I either failed to follow up (bookmarks) or ran into flaky technical issues with services (coComment). As I’ve moved more and more of my information-gathering into RSS (I use Google Reader), a couple months ago I had a duh moment. Use comment feeds, you dummy!

WordPress offers comment feeds “out of the box” and many other blogging platforms have it as an option. When I see a post that has (or is likely to have) interesting comments, I simply subscribe to the comment feed using Google Reader. I’ve setup a label (tag) in Google Reader for comments, so it’s easy to go directly to the comments if I desire. Comments are short-lived, but I don’t worry about constantly cleaning things up, since every few months I’ll look at the Google Reader Trends page to find stale feeds for removal and the comment feeds can be removed at that time.

The only downside is that there are still some blogs I follow that don’t offer comment feeds (I’m looking at you, Metroblogging Portland) so there are cases where this isn’t a perfect solution.