You can use Thunderbird or Outlook Express to subscribe to and read newsfeeds. Newsfeeds will look like an email.

This is good, but the problem is that you can't reply to a news the same way you can reply to an email or a newsgroup post.

So I decided to try to bridge that gap.

Point a news reader of your choice to our nntp server nntp.dcomments.com and start using this service.

Anyone can read posts but your must be logged in with dcomments.com username and password in order to be able to add replies

Dcommens «D» stands for Distributed. It truelly is distributed because it lets people subscribe to blogs in the same way they subscribe the newsgroups. You read the newsfeeds the same way you read the newsgroups and can also reply. Your replies will be seen by other people who are subscribed to the same newsfeeds and they in turn can reply back.

The replies will also be seen on our website in a browser-based front-end. The original blog where the article came from will also be notified by ping-trackback protocol when someone adds a comment about the article and that blog can in turn display a reply on their website.

And if the blog provides the rss feed for comments, then we will also be checking for new comments to a blog article and when new comments are posted on the blog, they will also be added to newsgroups in the correct thread.

Another big advantage of having a true newsgroup-based system is that other newsgroup providers can carry the same newsgroups that we have, reaching even more potential readers.

A blog owner who participates in our service will have a new newsgroup created just for his or her blog as well as having the new articles also posted to a more general 'category' group. The benefit for the blog owners can be a huge increase of readership for their blog.

There are no downside to using our service. We never change a content of blog's posts, we don't remove advertising or links and we always add link to original article on the originating blog to all newsgroup posts.

As an added benefit we also do instant tag cloud for each new blog entry, extract the number of outgoing links, number of images, thumbnail the images and even generate screenshots of blog's pages.

Using these extracted tags and other data that may be provided in blog's feed, we can generate links to 'similar' posts as well as do other things like notify subscribers by email when a new post with user defined keywords is posted to our database.

We also run every new feed through the feed validator and run blogs through html validator to determine the site design 'standard compliance'. This data can be used for showing the order or items – most standard-compiant have priority.

There will be more features added in the future. The big emphasis will be on customization – where a user can define which feeds he or she wants to include on home page, what format to present the news in – a simplified to download pages faster or with more text, what layout and styles to use, what language, internationalization like in which format to show time and dates

The development of the new features takes place on dev.dcomments.com

Feed free to periodically check this dev site to see what's new.

 

We encourage anyone who is interested in discussing this service to sign up to our mailing list.

Mailing list list is also available as a newsgroup To use newsgroups format you just point your newsreader to nntp.dcomments.com server you will need to login with your dcomments.com username and password.