Dave asks a question about comments, specificly "Every time I post a comment on a weblog I have to remember to go back and see if anyone followed up. We have to figure a way to automate this. Agree or disagree?"
I agree. I've thought about this on and off for a while and am thinking there needs to be some overall rethinking of comments in Radio. First off, radio supplies a way to handle comments. I don't use it because I already had my own commenting system in place long before it became available. But the thing I like about my commenting system is that the page uses CSS so that I can easily style it to look like my blog. Yes, it is purely a visual thing, but I think a lot of bloggers do care about things like this. One other big gripe I have with radio's comments is that they display the commenter's email address. Making it that much easier for them to be harvested for spam.
Now as far as following conversations in comments, I think it's possible, but there are possible tradeoffs. LiveJournal handles comments well by being a somewhat closed system. If you are a LiveJournal user and you comment on someone's post you get notified of any answers. I'm pretty sure that there's no way for this to happen with anonymous comments. I think the easiest way might be to work it in with RSS. You can maybe tag a certain blog post as one to watch, the aggregator will hourly look to see if the comments have changed and let you know if they have. This might be the easiest way to handle a wide range of commenting systems.
