Last week Russell brought up the idea of an RSS only blog. The general idea is to only provide content via a feed instead of the traditional web page method. I think this quickly became an interesting question that wasn’t going to develop in to something particularly useful. Producing something usable wasn’t as important the other ideas that this question spawned and the conversation surrounding it.
The next experiment with blogging and feeds that Russell is trying out is forms in feeds. He took the first logical step, adding a comment form as part of a blog entry in his feed. I tried it out in Bloglines and it seemed to work correctly. There are a few problems that I see with this though.
- Information (like your name, URL and email) can’t be remembered via this method. I suppose there will be some who will see this as a good excuse to extend RSS or ATOM. I don’t think it is worth it.
- Potential for comment spam. Russell moderates all of his comments so it isn’t a huge issue for him. I’ve said it before, if you are going to try something new or develop a new technology, take some time to think about how it can be used for evil. Yes comment spam is evil.
- It may not work in all cases. That might turn out to be a none issue, after all there is nothing stopping people from adding comments the old fashioned way.
I think there is some potential here, although I think a variant of this idea will be more useful. I’d like to see a link that pops up a little comment window. It would work similar to the way the del.icio.us bookmarklet does, it would be able to remember your info, ask some additional info to avoid comment spam and should work in most cases because it simply another link. I should work up a WordPress plugin or something to try out this idea. In the mean time try out Russell’s comment form in his feed and see what you think.