I'm reading a post from the head lemur, on the general topic of communication, online communities, and splogs - it's pretty good stuff, but I do have a small, technically oriented nit:

It is about the lost opportunity to engage in dialogue. You cannot comment from a news reader, aggregator, social links page, you have to come here. This is where engagement and dialogue takes place. That is at the end of the day, what it is all about. The internet is the one place where it is easier to ask permission that ask forgiveness.

That's not entirely true. There aren't a ton of blogs that support the CommentAPI, but they do exist (this is one of them). Heck, I follow the comment trail (on the Smalltalk blogs) in my aggregator, and I do nearly all of my commenting from the aggregator. In fact, of the 280 feeds that I subscribe to, 48 support the CommentAPI (meaning, I can comment directly from my aggregator). I discovered that via a simple script in my BottomFeeder runtime:

supportingFeeds := RSSFeedManager default getAllMyFeeds select: [:each |
	| items allows |
	items := each allItems.
	allows := items detect: [:eachItem | eachItem commentAPIUrl notNil] ifNone: [nil].
	allows notNil]

So in fact, if your blogging software and aggregator software line up on features, you can comment without punching through to the HTML page.

Which is truly a side point in the context of the entire post, which I encourage you to read. It's great stuff about the damage done by sploggers:

Because of the ease of creation, open formats, and the astonishing number of applications written to capture RSS, splogs were born. Their whole purpose is to game the system, by creating sites that people will go to, click on ads, and make money for sploggers on other peoples work. These people are not adding to the great conversation or contributing to the web. They are stealing content, setting up self referring networks, all to steal money from advertisers, and breed anger and mistrust.

Go ahead, read the whole thing :)

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