Larry Hosken: New:

When I write a post at this here blog, that post gets around. It's syndicated on Friendfeed, Google Buzz, LJ, FB, ... and probably other places I forgot. People can comment on it in all those places. I'd kinda like to read their comments, but it's annoying to flit between these sites.

Some smart folks came up with the salmon protocol, a way for comments to make their way "upstream" back to the post they refer to. You'd think that it would be pretty easy to make that happen—couldn't you just "ping" some address to point out a comment? But it turns out that folks tried that, and it got pretty spammy pretty quickly. Someone webspammer sets up a spammy site and "pings" several other sites. Those other sites think they got "mentioned" by the spammy site and reciprocit-ish-ly link back. So you have a bunch of sites that link to a spammy site, which is not what you want. So Salmon tries pretty hard to guard against abuse. Salmon's pretty new.

So there's this new protocol floating around. But now you have to get folks to implement it. Anyhow, that's kind of the state of the world back at the start of this year. At the time, I was figuring out how folks would write comments on this blog. I chose Disqus. And then a few weeks later, someone mentioned that this outfit called status.net had implemented Salmon! Oh man. I made a note to myself to check out their blog commenting system.

This morning, I finally got around to that. And I found out that... status.net isn't a blog commenting system at all. It's more of a... Suppose that you work ad a mid- to large-size organization. You'd like your people to be able to communicate with each other by "microblogging"—posting little messages, subscribing to each other's "feeds". It sounds like Twitter or Facebook, but you want to restrict this to just people in your organization. Status.net gives you that. And it uses Salmon so that folks on one status.net network can comment on folks on another such. It's kinda neat, but not what I'm looking for.

I registered with status.net and tweaked my blog so that if anyone tries to salmon-ping me, that'll get sent over to my status.net. But I kinda doubt that'll work; probably status.net isn't expecting any salmon-pings that are talking about my blog posts. It probably only expects salmon-pings that are about status.net posts.

So basically, I tinkered with a bunch of stuff all morning, but in the end it was probably a waste of time. Except now I can stop agonizing about how I should be using status.net as my blog commenting system.

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