Wouldn't it be great . . .

Wouldn't it be great if you could subscribe to the comments of certain blogs (or better yet, to certain posts) in your reader?  I'm going to add it to my wish list (we're actively working through these sorts of ideas at both Newsgator and Feedburner).

I must have reached some kind of critical mass in my readership where I'm actually getting a reasonable number of comments and trackbacks to my posts.  It got me to look at the comments to some of the other blogs that I read (I rarely visit sites directly - rather I read them in Newsgator).  Turns out that there are great comments out there that I'm completely missing.  The solution for the moment is to click through on posts that I particularly like or think will be well commented to and see what's posted, but wouldn't it be great to be able to subscribe to these and read them directly in your reader.  In an ideal world you could subscribe to comments for only those posts that you care to see feedback on.  Yup - that would be pretty cool . . .

Comments

[Ben Casnocha]

This already exists, but I've only seen it on techie blogs who must have some custom script to allow readers to subscribe to comments on a post (I've done it - it's nice). Now it's just building it into TypePad, Newsgator, etc so the average user can utilize hte tool.

[Bo]

definitely a good idea. would be nice for other readers to be able to comment on the quality of the comments so that they can be sorted in order of relevance.

[Jeff Clavier]

Yup, this functionality would be great. I believe that BlogWare has the capability of sending emails when further comments are added.

And Buzznet (and Flickr ?) also allow users who are registered to see the list of comments they left over the last X days, and follow through on them.

[Babak Nivi]

WordPress offers this. You can subscribe to the comments feed for an article or for the entire site. Lots of people are using WordPress these days though there is no hosted solution that I am aware of.

For example, you can subscribe to the comments for my blog (look on the sidebar) or to the comments for any article (look at the bottom of any article). Look here:

http://www.nivi.com/blog

[Matt]

In addition WordPress uses the wfw comment RSS extensions to link to the comment RSS feed from every single syndicated item. We've been doing this for over a year because aggregator builders said if it existed in feeds they'd support it.