Stephen Francoeur, in a post a couple of days ago, poses this really excellent question about blog-iquette:

I’m not quite sure of the best way to reply to comments left at the end of postings. If I post my reply as a comment, will the original commenter think to go back to see if I’ve written my reply there? Or should I respond by doing an entirely new post, which the original commenter is more likely to see? My messier solution for now: post a new message mentioning the comment and noting my own follow-up comment.

WordPress has the feature that you can subscribe to an RSS feed for comments on individual posts. Do other blog apps have that functionality? And does anyone actually use it anyway? Paul, the few times I’ve commented on his blog, has emailed me in reply, & following his lead I’ve taken to doing that with my own commenters sometimes. But the problem with that is, my reply then isn’t public. Scott comments on his own blog, & has managed to get some actual conversations going from time to time, so clearly his readers are avid enough to check back.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to handle this situation?