Keeping track of blogs: a rant

I have been annoyed by this before, but more so now because I’m either missing something or someone should have done something about it by now (presumably those geeks whom, if they all went to a Star Trek convention, would cause the planet to crash, as hinted by Jonathan Zittrain).

I would like to track the class’s blogs so I can see everything, without having to go to each individual blog and click on each comments link for each post. I also want to track my own comments.

No one could accuse me of having a Pollyanna-ish idea of progress, but it seems we are still in 2004 with the RSS readers and aggregation technologies available to us.

I can, and do, use Google Reader. I can subscribe to the feeds from everyone’s blogs and put them there. I can put them all in a folder, which I have done (later Dr Couros got us the bundle), so I can read all the posts and scroll.

But the feeds are of two types: Posts and Comments. These are separate feeds for each blog. I spent this morning going through and pasting the feeds for everyone’s Comments into a separate folder. If I put them in the same folder with the posts, it made a mess, since you can only organize by newest, oldest, or “magic” (I hate it when they get cute – where’s my wand?).

[Some blogs didn’t have a comments feed visible, so I had to figure out to put “comments/feed” or “feed/comments” to adapt their post feed.

I used to be the type of person to put everything in files and clear my desktop (you know, a real desktop, the kind with old-fashioned papers and pens on it). Since getting hooked into the internet (think Borg) I now think laterally, and have papers spread out all over my desk, and a zillion “files” (objects) scattered on my virtual desktop (think Nicholas Carr). I have to search now to find particular emails in Gmail, and particular files on my computer because my personal filing system has failed. I need Desktop Computer 3.0 to happen NOW.

So why are the aggregators so behind?

For keeping track of my own comments (so I can have some record of what the heck I’m thinking), I had tried Co.mments (which I used, badly, for CCK08), but I went back to it and it’s gone. I’m trying Cocomment, but its Firefox extension causes crashes and it’s horrible slow.

Please, tell me I’m the one behind and I’m missing an easier way to have everyone’s posts, followed by the comments they received, all nicely open and nested on one scrollable screen?