In the past few days. it looks like Manton Reece implemented a feature request from Dave Winer in the Micro.blog service that Manton runs. Dave asked for a RSS feed to be created so that he could be aware of when people comment on linkblog items that he posts to Micro.blog. If this were available, Dave would not have to go to the Micro.blog user interface to the Mentions link to see if anyone “mentioned” him in a post.

Now, in and of itself, I would agree that this is a useful feature. To me, being able to use RSS and feeds in general to get some notification of content updates from a web site or weblog is incredibly useful. As an aside, WordPress has supported this from day 1 (here is a comment feed from my blog). As another example, when Colin Walker and I were collaborating on MyStatusTool, Colin proposed a RSS namespace to support comments within a RSS feed.

However, the nit I want to pick at is – Dave Winer was interested in who was commenting on his linkblog posts. But – in past posts/podcasts, Dave has said that blogs should not have comments. Yet, he wants to know who is commenting on his posts. This begs the question – how can people let Dave know that they have commented on his posts? Answer: they can’t. Well, here is one way that this can happen (for Micro.blog users).

Another way is the comment system that Dave is implementing as part of his WordLand development project. But….he hasn’t rolled it out yet. And… you have to use his tool to make a comment so that he can then be made aware of that someone had a comment. Seems limiting, doesn’t it? In the past, Dave has relied on Github as a comment space (when he wants to have a discussion, he creates an issue there and points to it). However, that is a space controlled (and moderated) by him, so some comments might get deleted by him. Again, not encouraging.

So – how can people comment and/or have a conversation? They have to be using a tool/service that supports this (as an example, Micro.blog). Just this morning, I can see several Micro.blog conversations where Dave Winer is participating (see here, here, and here.) I am guessing that Dave is using the Micro.blog reading interface to respond – that is what I do, but maybe there is another way to do it.

It just seems to me that there is something of a double standard here (write comments about my posts on your blog, I don’t want it on my blog, but I want to know what you are saying…) – am I missing something here? Anyone – feel free to share your thoughts as comments on my blog!