Two Posts - One Comment Thread

Fred Wilson — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:33:30 -0700

One of the many great things about using a third party comment system is you can hang a single comment thread off of as many posts as you want. That's what's going on right now on this blog and Alley Insider.

I have an understanding with a number of blogs that they can pick up anything I write on this blog and republish it on their blog, but it must be in its entirety and attributed to me and link back to here. Alley Insider is one of them and they picked up my post this morning about a better slate of directors for the Yahoo board. But they went one step further and replaced their usual comment system with disqus for that one post. Go check it out.

So now, if you comment on that post on either this blog or Alley Insider, you get into one single discussion. Which is as it should be.

I can think of a bunch of reasons to do this. A repost/reblog like Alley Insider is doing. Or when I point to a post on the Union Square Ventures weblog, which I do often. It would be best if the comments to both are in the same thread. Or I could imagine that a group of bloggers agree to all blog about the same issue at the same time and agree to share one single comment thread. And there are probably a bunch of other reasons you might want to do this.

I've always thought that there is no reason that comments need to be tightly linked to the blogging service and this is yet another example of why that is so.