Full-text feeds and weblog comments

Comment on post 3836 on 11/17/03 by Liz Lawley. I think for many of us the goal is to get our thoughts *written*–the being read is a secondary bonus. 🙂 The real problem with full-text feeds, I think, is that they make it more likely that comments–which I think are a critical part of many weblog entries–will be missed. 🙁 [chaosplayer News]

As expected, Liz raises several cogent points about my bias for full-text feeds. First, like Liz, my initial goal in blogging was to make it easier to get my thoughts written down in the first place. Discovering that there were people out there who wanted to read them was a secondary and welcome bonus.

As for missing comments, I'm less clear. It was a while before I enable comments at all. I do get comments and those that I get are always valuable. My solution to not missing comments on  my own weblog is to provide an RSS feed from my comments so they flow into my aggregator. The only drawback to that approach I can see is that comments do get separated from the original post as they come into the aggregator, but I can always go back to the weblog itself to track the comments in place. I also find that the bulk of the discussions I track tend to be cross-blog rather than comment-centric. The question, of course, is whether that observation in an artifact of my being aggregator-biased. How many good discussions am I missing by not tracking comments on other blogs more closely?

For that matter, why, or perhaps when, would you choose to post a comment instead of making an entry in your own blog? The technologies are opening up more choices; are there any emerging guidelines or practices to direct my choices.