Comments on: Idea: Embedding RSS comments in a content RSS feed

By: Mike Jones

Mike Jones — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:05:49 +0000

Hi,
Our RSS Server:

http://www.easybyte.com/products/enterpriserss.html

Has commenting ability on the output direct in an RSS Reader, such as our Ticker.

Please download the demo version and try it out if you dont believe me!

By: alexbarrera

alexbarrera — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:12:07 +0000

Hi idetrorce, why is that? I would love to hear thesis against the idea because I’m sure that if it hasn’t been implemented mainstream it might be because of something. Please elaborate more

By: Idetrorce

Idetrorce — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 06:32:18 +0000

very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce

By: alexbarrera

alexbarrera — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:14:53 +0000

Hello Nick,
Glad to hear from you! First of all congrats on the Scoble review How was Leweb? I was going to go but dropped it at the last minute (for what I see, that was a bad idea TM).

Well, I thought about the polling problem, that’s why using the number attribute (or the slash:comments tag) is of vital importance. If you combine both you don’t need to poll for both RSS. You poll for the content one as usual and keep track of the number of comments. When and only when the number of comments changes you poll for the comments RSS. So, even though you indeed make more connections, it’s still less than if you have two separate RSS, one for content and one for comments.

Another way is to use something like Coment or the recent Adobe BlazeDS. But those solutions requite a very big architecture change for most blogs/platforms and will never happen.

What do you think?

By: Nick Halstead

Nick Halstead — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:56:31 +0000

The problem with any solution that just points at another feed url for comments is that any aggregator would have to poll every single feed supplied, so if you have 100 posts, does it then have to poll 100 different url’s? Of course that would never work, you could of course have something like http://pingomatic.com/ inform you when next to check the feed, but the number of feeds would explode into figures that would be unmanageable.

The only solution (and going back to your example of OPML) is to have a hierarchy so that comments are embedded in with the posts.

We could also do with standardizing a RESTful interface to RSS/ATOM so that requests can be made to limit the amount of data to request.

We have with fav.or.it spent a lot of effort overcoming these problems, and the only way to push forward these things is to gain mass adoption of any new standard by making it easy to adopt and there to be reason for it to be adopted. This will take time.

By: buckpost

buckpost — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:57:10 +0000

Fav.or.it looks interesting. I like the fact there are people looking to take a new tact on RSS readers. You should check out AideRSS.com for another take on the RSS reader.