There is one thing that consistently drives me nuts about reading TypePad blogs: I can’t easily follow the conversation. There’s only one way to follow comments on most TypePad blogs (if you know something I’ve missed, please let me know), and that’s to add a single post’s comment feed to my RSS reader.

This is all right for a single post, but oh my, it gets tedious if I’m interested in more than one. It keeps me from being heavily involved in blogs I might otherwise be following obsessively—because I’m not just interested in the posts. I’m interested in the conversation.

When I leave a comment, I want to know if anyone’s responded to it. I want to know if other comments reference it. I want to know what other people think, independent of my opinion. If it’s not easy to follow up on these things, I won’t bother. I’m not going to bookmark that post and check back every few days. That’s too much trouble. And you know what? After awhile, clicking through to add per-post RSS feeds gets old.

Eventually, I notice that it affects my interest in commenting.

I actually notice myself feeling discouraged from leaving comments when I know I can’t track responses effortlessly, especially if the comment itself is a very, very tiny part of my day.

I’ve deconstructed this process for myself, and I recognize it when it happens. But your users might not. How many of them are like me? How many of them become measurably more invested in a site when they can participate in the discussion?

How much more involved would they be in the things you say… if you made it easy for them?