Not long after I posted about the theoretical discussion aggregator, Brent Simmons released the latest NetNewsWire beta, which includes support for the comments tag in RSS 2.0. I’ve added the comments element to my RSS 2.0 feed. I think that the comment item borders on being completely useless. All it does is point to the link where comments could be posted. That may be useful for sites that use an external comment system for their blog posts, but many of those sites use Blogger and have no RSS feed anyway.
This feature does nothing to show how many comments are attached to each post, allow one to read the comments alongside the post in the aggregator or post new comments. I may try adding an experimental feed that includes the text of posted comments alongside my original post.
On the other hand, Jesse Lawrence is thinking along the same lines and he’s started to build a message board system built around RSS. Very cool.
