14 DAY TRIAL // Blogger has finally gotten some love in 2011 and the venerable blogging service has gotten a well-deserved update. There are new dynamic themes, a completely new dashboard and plenty of new features. But Google is not done, there's still plenty to do to bring Blogger up to spec.
One new feature just introduced probably should have been added a long time ago. Threaded comments have finally arrived at Blogger, making it possible to handle several conversations in the comments section.
Threaded comments mean you can reply to someone without your comment getting lost in the stream.
"A top request on the wishlist is improving Blogger’s commenting system, so we’re happy to announce that we’ve done just that," Pat Coleman, software engineer at Google, announced.
"Blogger now supports threaded commenting, which means that it is now much easier to differentiate between whether someone is making a general comment on the thread, or responding to another comment on the thread," he added.
Threaded comments are hardly a new invention, though there are still plenty of sites out there that could benefit from the feature, Facebook for example.
For any even mildly successful blogger, threaded comments mean that readers can be more engaged and that several conversations can spring up around any post. What's more, the conversations are easy to keep up with, meaning that others will be able to follow along, and also that the participants can carry on with the conversation for longer, without interference from other commenters.
Chances are, the feature is already enabled on your blog and you don't have to change or do anything to take advantage of it. The one caveat is that the Blog Feed has to be enabled and set to "Full." It's unclear what comments have to do with the availability of the RSS/Atom feed, but there's clearly a link somewhere.