OK, I admit it.  Like Many Others,  I hated the word Blogosphere when I first heard it.    It has come to grow on me however, versus saying "all the blogs out there"  or the "worldwide collection of blogs", you can just say blogosphere.  Besides, it just might be a 70's band. In any case, once you start commenting on blogs and waiting, perhaps, for replies to those comments, you quickly realize that you have no good way of tracking comments.   Sure, you can track posts, but comments?  How?

You'll be pleased to know that Phil Haack, (Sage of all Sages, Creator of the popular Subtext blogging platform that I'm currently using and contributing to, and partial author of a forthcoming .NET cookbook, chock full of timely pearls of wisdom for all things .net), has blogged about the release of new "Comment Watching" software, called --you guessed it -- "Comment Watcher" - actually "RSS Bandit Comment Watcher", from the good folks who brought you RSS Bandit.  There are some tasty screenshots, so make sure you click the link and check it out.   If you're a heavy commenter, you'll be glad you did, and this just might be reason enough to switch RSS Readers.  I think I'm going to.

While you're checking stuff out, check out Jeff Atwood's (a.k.a Coding Horror) take on flat versus threaded discussions in comments.  I think threaded discussions make the most sense if they're done well (and I will admit that they're usually not).  However, the technology certainly exists to make an intuitive, easy to use, threaded comment UI.  I don't know if it exists yet, but I can picture it; chock full of ajax goodness - expand and collapse those threads you're interested it, easily changeable threshold for how far down you're willing to go, some way of fitting in comments that have become indented too far, etc.  But it all works in my mind!  And it's *Fantastic*!