Okay, so I’m finally back after a week or so. And there’s been a lot going on in the blogosphere over that week, not least the conversation about comments. Lots of people have written and discussed about this. Two such people were Valeria Maltoni – who asked whether comments should be portable – and Robert Scoble – who said that the era of blogger’s control is over.

For me, the issue isn’t about control. The issue is about the conversations themselves. I would love to know what people are saying, and to be a part of the conversations – to interact with and answer my readers. And also, when different parts of conversations are happening on different places, the readers might not be able to get the whole picture/value of the conversation. If a really good conversation is happening on FriendFeed, the readers on the blog itself could miss out. And vice versa.

That’s the biggest issue for me about the fragmentation of comments. And I’m looking forward to see whether anyone manages to come up with a solution. I think the Feed with Comments plugin that I’m using here (as announced in the previous post) helps solve the second problem slightly – the comments being in the RSS feed themselves makes them available no matter where the feed is ported to.

What do you think?