New feature idea for Digg, HuffingtonPost, Reddit, and other major traffic gateways and communities

by phil on Sunday May 17, 2009 12:48 AM

I posted something on my blog about the history of eugenics today. I then cross-linked it on reddit.com. That reddit page now has 10 comments while as my page still has 0. Why can't I just get rid of my comments section and include the comments from reddit? Why can't I outsource the commenting functionality of my blog to the major gateways of traffic that are going to be holding the conversation anyway?

(Link to my post, "Plato was a eugenicist?," and its corresponding reddit page.)

What if Digg, in addition to giving you embed code for that cute "Digg This" badge that we see on every blog nowadays, also gave you embed code for all the comments they get?

Any site that is a major gateway for traffic could offer this kind of functionality. HuffingtonPost, for example, will link to a news article, heavily excerpt it, and then the HuffPo article will get 100+ comments while as the original news article will only get maybe 5-10 comments. Why can't the original article mix the HuffPo comments into the comment stream that is displayed on their page?

It can even be asked, shouldn't the content creator in those cases have the right to own the ensuing HuffPo conversation? They created the content after all?

Most likely we'll see this line blurred even further. These newswriters, if their primary goal is to simply get on HuffPo, might as well make their first publishing there. Or Digg could provide a blogger.com-style service, where the commenting and Digging functionality is heavily integrated.