Jeremy Zawodny has a interesting essay about how the current set of tools we have for manages conversations suck. This part, in particular, really struck a nerve for me.
It took me a while to figure this out, but every aggregator I’ve seen has completely fails to make it easy to stay engaged in a discussion taking place in comments on one or more blog posts. I typically comment on a blog post and never remember to go back to see if anyone else commented on what I said. That’s not much of a “conversation,” is it?
I use Rojo as my aggregator these days. It is pretty good (the best I have found so far) for reading stuff but, as Mr. Zawodny points out, it completely fails to help me engage in conversations. Worse it actually gets in the way, sometimes. For example, it obfuscates the links to the posts so that I cannot just do a “Copy Link Location” in my aggregator and then paste them into my blog. I am forced to click the obfuscated link provided by Rojo and then copy the real link from the address bar after the page has loaded.