What’s the most interesting aspect of reading a blog post or news article? Sure, the article itself may be interesting, but if you’re anything like me, the comments section is where the action’s at. Feedback, comments, corrections, outright flames and the wars that follow it; these are the things that make the “social” in social media.

Recognizing the fact, startups all over have been setup to facilitate these discussions. Reddit and Digg are examples of websites that focus only on facilitating discussion of online articles. Disqus attempts to be an outsourced discussion engine designed to host the discussions while alleviating the need for the original website to do so. While not specifically targeted towards this end Google Buzz is another avenue for surfers to share an interesting URL with their friends and start a discussion around the article.

And there lies the problem: discussions are scattered throughout the web. Most of the time, it’s probable that the original authors of the article don’t even know such discussion exists. I, for one, am not too keen on running around trying to track down all the discussions circling what I’ve wrote. Alright, let me correct that. I’m very interested in reading the discussion, I’m just not too keen on the running around bit. It gets old, after a while.

It would be very convenient if there’s a way to aggregate these discussions together into one place, for example the URL where the article was originally posted. Technically, it seems possible. I think it’s already established that the most suitable format for pushing threads of information is via content syndication feeds. RSS or Atom feeds, to be specific. I know that Google uses Atom feeds in their Buzz API, where 3rd party applications can use the API to interact with the Buzz engine and content contained within. So, in theory, if parties such as Buzz, Digg and Reddit play nice, a blog may be able to pull in a feed of discussion from each of these sites, merge them and sort them in order to present an aggregated feed of all the discussion that has taken place on the article.

How does the blog know if discussions have been happening on other site, though? If the blog owner is required to manually hunt down these discussions, it would still be a time-consuming task. TrackBack is a framework that allows source blogs to be informed when another blog mentions one of the articles in the source blog. If we can piggyback on the TrackBack specification to add on metadata that gives enough information on how to pull the discussion feed, that would effectively automate the whole discovery process of discussions.

Obviously, this suggestion may be counter-productive to Reddit and Digg, which relies on eyeballs on their own site to monetize their efforts. However, they have to remember that they do not have original source content. They rely on 3rd party content to generate the eyeballs on their own sites. I think it’s fair enough that they allow some reciprocal exchange of data in exchange for the content that owners contribute.

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