I currently use
OMEA Reader to keep track of blogs I subscribe to, which is almost 200. Somedays I don't respond to blog posts at all, regardless of how interesting they are or how much I may want to say about the topic, and there is a good reason for this - single post subscription.
Currently, when I respond to a post, I go flag it with a yellow flag in OMEA Reader so I can later bring up the posts that I have reponded to via a filter and go back and look at those again to see any responses. Now this works out pretty well, but what I really want is to be able to say "email me when someone comments on this post". Now as you all know, most blog engines provide this for the owner of a blog so that he/she can get emailed as soon as a comment shows up on any of their blog posts. I want that capability as a subscriber of a blog. The biggest reason I would like this functionality is because I do most of my blog reading from my work computer and that is where I have OMEA Reader installed. Even if I did have it installed at home, I would remember which posts I flagged as having responded to. Since my office is 26 miles away from my house, driving over there just to check blogs isn't a priority on the weekends. But, if I could just get the comments mailed to me from a particular blogs post, that would be sweet and save me a lot of catching up on Mondays (every day, for that matter).
The drawbacks? Plenty. The biggest one I can think of on a Saturday night is email servers carrying a much heavier load do to all the emails that might get sent out. One way to keep this down is to only allow people who post comments to subscribe, and as long as the blog owner doesn't remove your comment, you can receive emails of comments on that particular post. Of course, the blog owner can turn this functionallity on and off, but it doesn't seem like anything that would be very difficult to implement.
Do I have a valid argument here that could make someone seriously think about implementing this, or am I out of my mind? I myself lean toward "it's the
Peroni talking", but I think if it was an often requested feature, it would have been done by now. Now I know I'm not the only one who has thought about this... most of you have too. So why hasn't it been done?