Big aggregators have little aggregators upon their backs to bite 'em

There was a hoo-hah (yes, that's the correct technical term) before the weekend over blog aggregators taking comments away from original content sites. If the conversation fragments, goes the theory, no-one (including the people who originally wrote the content) will be able to follow it and everyone will be the poorer.

Alan Patrick handily solves this problem by proposing a "reverse aggregator" - if content aggregators can gather content from multiple blogs and conveniently assemble it in one place for the ostensible benefit of readers, presumably a similar service can gather comments from multiple feed aggregators and re-assemble them back at the original blog for the benefit of publishers.  And to be honest that pretty much seems to be that - now we're just waiting for someone to build the thing, or more likely for someone like Disqus or Cocomment to add it to their existing suite.