I've always wanted to see this in a Sphere-like way - I want to read HN's comments on random articles on BBC, for example, while I'm on BBC News. Or Read Reddit and Digg's comments in tabs beneath the original source article. I'd also like to be able to 'subscribe' to which communities' comments I'd be able to read.

Sounds interesting, could you expand on that?

he probably wants news.google.com but in a format like mail.google.com's threads. kind of like techmeme, i imagine.

I want blogs to look like Usenet, so that best affordance for a response is another blog post, not a comment. Comments are evil.

There's enough structure in blogs (blogrolls, tags, date, author, backlinks) --- especially if you mine comments --- to do take a stab at this.

I'm interested to hear why you think comments are evil.

Would there be any way to make that discussion-like structure accept input from anonymous, infrequent, or lazy users? Setting up a blog just to reply might leave out some decent responses.

They're second-class outlets. A blog author can say whatever they want; their posts are first-class elements in Google's corpus; the medium encourages stand-alone writing instead of meaningless squibs.

The original vision of the "blogosphere" rejected comments. "Write a blog post, instead." Here's an old, well-known example:

http://www.markbernstein.org/Apr0401/Whyblogcommentsarebad.h...

The problem right now is that the affordances favor comments over posts. The first step is to adjust them; it just so happens that by making a threaded blog-group reader, you're also providing a lot of value to people who don't care that comments are evil, but do find it hard to follow 10 different blogs talking about the same thing.

I love that idea. I'd use it.

Would you help build it?

I'd really like to eradicate blog comments.

Possibly, but I'm not sure I've got the bandwidth. Drop me an email and let me know what you have in mind ([email protected]).