We’re very much in the middle of the Syndication revolution - Everything out there on the web can be syndicated  - Be it the latest news, your friends’ photos and videos, your favorite TV Show episodes, and so on. Even sites lacking any technological platform for publishing can be subscribed to using online tools.

Now in all this - perhaps the most popular type of feeds that we syndicate to are blog posts. And typically, they support commenting. In fact, commenting is an integral part of the blogging experience. The discussion adds mass to the content of the original post, sometimes even surpassing it in meaningful content. Or, it can go completely haywire and spread out into several branches of context. Either ways, it’s something without which blogging won’t be blogging.

So my rue is this - I would like to participate in the discussions on a blog post right from my newsreader. That implies two things-

1. I want to view the stream of comments along with the post. This isn’t hard to achieve, given that almost all blogging platforms provide RSS feeds for comments to posts, and a couple of newsreaders that support the display of those comments.
2. I want to be able to comment right from my newsreader. This is important because it makes the whole process of ‘participating’ with the said blog or news site much more intuitive for me, and, the newsreader can then keep track of my comments and conversations in a more organized way than I do currently through coComment or commentful. They’re really good tools, both of them, but they sporadically don’t work. coComment, for instance, is a very nice tool that integrates with a lot of social sites apart from just blogging platforms, but somehow for me it isn’t able to update the latest comments on a lot of them.

The second feature requires the website to publish an XML-RPC API (Here’s what XML-RPC means) similar to the ones that allow people to be able to post to their blog from desktop applications. Wordpress is the only blogging platform that I’ve worked with, and I’ve checked - it doesn’t have one. There is an XMLRPC for traceback, but nothing for commenting.

Is this something that just hasn’t been implemented because no one thought of it, or is it just that no one wants to have this - for fear for people not coming to the blog’s website for commenting? Or is the concern related to additional spam?

I think lack of visitors is a self-countering argument - While there may be lesser people visiting to comment on the site’s interface, there would actually be more people commenting and being active on the site - and the positive effect of that should balance out the concerns. I’m not sure if spam is a factor either - sure, the spammer now has one URL to attack - but the post id (That I suppose would be a parameter in the call to such a service) is still dynamic. And in any case, the interface just as secure as the rest of the site is to spammers. I’m not sure how captchas can be implemented in such a service - but I’m sure they can be.

Reading this on a newsreader? Click the post title, wait for the page to load, scroll to the bottom for my cute little commenting interface, and fill in your thoughts!