This is a summary-so-far and for posterity to a on-again-off-again discussion that he been on going for nearly a year -- comment tracking and monitoring.
There is a fairly simply solution, comments should be available as an RSS web service and aggregators should be able to subscribe to those feeds on an on-going or trial subscription
basis.
Site with comments et al need to provide them as an RSS web service. (They can be dynamically generated or statically -- the implementation doesn't matter.) Some already do this, others could add some form of it quite easily.
Aggregators then need to evolve to support subscriptions based on time and/or activity. (Subscribe for 30 days. Unsubscribe if a new post is not made to this feed for 14 days.) An add-on to this is that aggregators can create groups and sort on them, perhaps even offer an activity log so you know when a subscription has been dropped and so on.
The bottom line is there is no need for a new web app and it doesn't have to be that difficult. Ben Hammersley also sounds off here.
For further reading and the source of this simple genius follow these links:
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