On Comments

You get what you pay for. One disadvantage of working with free blogging services like Blogger is that there is no way to subscribe to the comments (only authors can be notified by email when there is a new comment, a feature which I urge you to activate if you haven't already).

Having to check each blog to see if there have been any new comments sort of defeats the purpose of RSS aggregators, but unless I force everyone to use a service that allows people to subscribe to an RSS feed for comments (such as Anthony and Michael's blogs), we are stuck.

But there are a couple of things we CAN do. One option is to provide a link at the end of your post to a Quicktopic, a service that lets users subscribe to comment feeds. That's the way Boing Boing used to do it in the old days. Another (better) option is simply to bring back the discussion to your blog, which we are all subscribed to (that's why bloggers spend alot of time blogging about what other bloggers have said, instead of just leaving their thought in the comments section).

For example, my next post will be a review of some of your IE project proposals. Instead of leaving my comments on individual blogs, I thought that this is something all of you would benefit from seeing, so I am blogging it (you could choose to blog a collective review of various proposals, as well).

Sometimes it's appropriate to leave a comment for the author of a post, knowing that they will be notified by email. But when you want to make sure that the rest of the class reads your comment, consider 'kicking it up a notch' and posting it on your own blog!

(It's still a good idea to check the comments on people's blogs once in a while. There are some hidden gems there!)