Sorry my confusion, that as a kind of reflection of the comments on the original blog makes a lot of sense, and feedburner already does that for wordpress.com blogs, which is a nice feature.

I also like that citation tool, we’re planning on playing with Zotero now that it has a shared online database and feeds, using it to pull in bibliographies based a an assortment of feeds might prove interesting.

There is a good example of this explained here.

BTW, this citation plugin is nice too – just the kind of unobtrusive scholarly/academic/library accoutrements that could add value to the collection for the researcher-of-the-future.

Out of curiosity, how would comments not be key to an archive of a medium like blogs? I really think without archiving the comments—you lose much of the conversation. But I have to admit, I can see ton of use cases where the comments are not vital, but for blogs I would think they would be crucial.

@Joss Will await this with interest, in case there’s some ideas we can borrow. Though as I mentioned, our centre-of-attention is the Post – but I see the Comment feed is quite central to your plans.

http://code.google.com/p/jiscpress/issues/detail?id=8

We hope to have this ready for the end of July.

I’ve seen your work and it is a brilliant idea, I’ll definitely be in touch. And the idea of allowing comments to show up on both the orginal and aggregated blog post is really the issue, a cross-aggregation mechanism should be fairly straightforward for wordpress given they now link comments directly to posts, the reall issue though comes down to the fact that all the different services like Blooger, LiveJournal, TypePad, etc. have very different ways of dealing with comments, making this a half-baked solution. I think the solution may lie in larger identity management for comments across the internet, a place where people control their comments much like they control their log space. But that is beyond me, and Stephen Downes has talk about this in some depth in regards to identity management, and it makes sense. But for now I, like you, am searching for the quick fix.

They say great minds think alike… and fools seldom differ!

I’m working on the ArchivePress project, and hope we can keep in touch. Our chief aim is to find an alternative to the crawling/spidering approach of much web archiving, that treats blogs as static pages, and ignores the potential of treating them as the dynamic data sources they really are: the Post, not the Page, is the atom of blogging.

At the moment we are trying out scenarios much like yours using a single WP installation, but once we’ve got our basic concepts proved, WPMU is the logical next step.

As you say, importing Comments is the real killer in making this approach an acceptable solution; and ideally we want to be non-invasive of the original blog (not needing login, API key etc). My current idea is to emulate the functionality of FeedWordPress, automatically seeding the aggregator with the URL of the Comments RSS-feed for each Post imported – as long as we can reliably find it in the feed item entry. If you come across anyone who manages to make an progress with that before we do, please let me know!

Better get back to write something for our blog now…!

I know no fu. I practice random acts of computer violence without rhyme or reason.