Unquiet

There’s a whole lot of dialogue around the web these days regarding the use of the Internet as a social tool - shared bookmarks ala , tagging galore, etc. And blogging software (like Wordpress) supports that to some degree by offering pingbacks and trackbacks so that someone writing an entry about somebody else’s entry can ‘link’ the two automatically.

Blog software also offers commenting on stories. Half the fun of reading what other people write is sounding off on their ideas. But if I want to respond in a way that people who read my blog can read my comments as well, I __have__ to write the entry on my blog and do the trackback thing.

What if there were some sort of tool that allowed me to comment on _other people’s blogs_ and have my comments appear as ‘comebacks’ on my site? In essence, it would work by me telling my own blog that I posted a comment somewhere and my blog confirming that it was really me, then posting the comment on my own as a mini-entry.

I imagine it could probably hook into something like [OpenID][], since the verification process would also be a boon for the other person’s blog - they’d know it was really me.

[openid]: http://www.danga.com/openid/ “An actually distributed identity system”

Something like this could really enrich dialogue on the web - it brings much of the back-and-forth out of the buried shadows of the comments and out into the forefront.