My two cents on this week's Bitchmeme

Saturday, April 12, 2008 by Dave Winer.

A Bitchmeme is something that happens on weekends when new stories are in short supply so ideas that otherwise would be buried on Techmeme rise to the top. Usually they're people complaining about something or other which is why they're called Bitchmemes and not Happymemes or Sarcasticmemes.  

This week's Bitchmeme is about comments on blogs and where they belong, on the blog, or on an aggregator. For example, when this item is viewed through FriendFeed they will allow comments on it over there and I'll probably miss them unless I go look for them. I will certainly miss the comments on Shyftr which I have never heard of until today and have never used, but from what I hear it does the same thing. Is this a good or bad thing? Well if you like to know what people think it's bad. If you ask a question in a post, as I often do, you might miss some good info.  

But what we cast to the wind, someone will eventually gather for us. Before Technorati, all we had were referrer logs to find out who was talking about us. Technorati is a bit better. There will of course eventually be the equivalent of Technorati, which assembles in one place, all the comments about each blog post. Wouldn't be too hard to do. 

But RSS 2.0, believe it or not, has a solution built-in, the <comments> element. If more blog publishing tools supported it, then FriendFeed et al could use it.  

Let me walk through how it works. 

1. Here's my RSS feed, and here's a screen shot showing the comments element on this post. 

2. Here's an example of an aggregator that supports the comments element. If an item has comments, theres a little pencil icon next to it. Just click the pencil to go to the comments. Pretty simple, or so it seems. 

Nothing more to it.  

Those are my two cents.  

PS: An example of a post of mine that ironically became a Bitchmeme. I say ironically because it was a bitch about how crap (e.g. that post) ends up on Techmeme cause of the cesspool nature of the so-called tech blogosphere. If you don't get the joke, don't bother, it's not actually that funny.