Dealing with comments and feeds

Tim Bray has some thoughts on how to make sure comments on his blog posts get the recognition they deserve.

One problem I’ve always had with commenting systems on blogs is that I haven’t yet found an easy way to follow a conversation that interests me. (On my own blog, I subscribe to the comment feed, so it’s easy to keep up.) Sometimes I post in the comments of other blogs, and having a simple way to keep track of what’s been posted since I submitted my comment would be very helpful. Ideally this could be accomplished without subscribing to the comment feeds for every blog I read.

Some weblogs feature comment feeds for each individual posts. What I’d love is a web page to feed reader API that would enable me to either automatically subscribe to the comments for a single post automatically whenever I post a comment, or to do so with a single click. Ideally my feed reader would also unsubscribe from them automatically after a set period of time with no activity.

Update: Sam Ruby has already essentially solved this problem.