as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

The might of the blogsphere is gradually turning away from new-post-notification, which has Pingback, TrackBack, blo.gs, and whatnot in place, and toward the thorny problem of comment notification. Remembering where you commented on someone's weblog and then going back to check for updates is, frankly, a pain. Simon Willison points us at a suggestion by Dave Winer: the "You Know Me" button, where a weblog pings a central identity server when a new comment is made. I'm not sure about this; depending on central servers doesn't seem like a good idea to me, especially when that central server guy either runs out of money and gives up or starts charging people for access. It'd be interesting to have an identity, though; perhaps weblog comment boxes, instead of asking for your name, email address, and URL, should instead just ask for the URL of your FOAF file. Better still, just ask for the URL of your weblog and then auto-discover the FOAF file. In there you could quite happily have a "comment ping" URL which should be pinged whenever someone else posts to a thread in which you participated. Flash people with threaded comments can generalise this to a direct or indirect reply directly to one of your own comments.

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