Amy Gahran, in her new blog Amy Gahran: The Right Conversation writes Weblogs are currently one of the most lively and provocative types of conversational media, all because of one simple feature: Comments. Blogs that allow comments are transformed from mere publishing to a facet of the public conversation. The problem is, though, that's right now it's just not as easy as it should be to follow that part of the conversation.

She goes on to mention the three basic problems for following conversations in the world of blogs and within blog comments specifically. Here's my own wording of the problems as I see it:

1) Finding conversations
Due to the sporadic nature of comments being added to a blog entry, search engines spidering your site will pick up the available comments at the moment in time when they are visiting your site, and may not get around to indexing any new comments for weeks. Not all blog systems include comments in their feeds either, so blog-specific search engines may never see comments added to your site.

2) Staying current
Most people reading blogs are familiar with feeds and sites like Bloglines make it easy to follow the latest posts to a blog. Comments are all to easy to ignore, and following a conversations there requires the extra effort of checking the blog's site on a regular basis for updates.

3) Keeping it altogether
Even though someone else may have started a conversation, many bloggers post comments and commentary to their own blog (this post is a case in point). Trackbacks are a system that was supposed to handle linking posts across blog sites and software, but as Amy mentions trackback spam is a terrible problem. I turned this feature off on my site because I could find no way to prevent the spammers from abusing it (unlike other types of spam). If there were a way to connect the dots and show a visual or threaded view of comments across blogs, that would be beneficial.

One additional problem that Amy didn't mention with conversations can be the volume of comments (although my site is a poor example of comment overload). In any solution to "the comment problem", it would be a good idea to consider filtering and/or leveling (similar to Slashdot's moderation levels). With an automated way of "bubbling up" comments from people in your trust network and pushing down offensive or off-topic comments, it might be easier to wade through high-traffic topic comments.

Hmmm... sounds like one of those "hard problems" that Paul Graham mentioned in his essay "How to Make Wealth".