I just came up with a new idea for using the wonderful tagging feature in Google Reader: Use it to keep track of blog posts I’ve left comments on.

I try to leave comments on any blog post that I think is worthwhile, mostly to give feedback to the author, and also because I sometimes have an honest question. The problem is with 250 feeds and leaving tons of comments every day, I can never remember which blog post I left a comment that I wanted to follow up on.

This is where the tagging support in Google Reader makes me giddy with happiness. Let’s say I’m reading a post by David on the New Zero-Day Mac OS X Flaw.  Now I know that my buddy Quinn worships at the altar of Apple, so I leave a comment just to see what response he’s going to give, and then I tag the post with “Commented” by hitting the “t” key and typing in the tag:

Now when I want to check a few days later on who has responded to my comment, I just hit the gt key combination to bring up the tags dialog:

I hit enter, and then I’m viewing the list of items that I’ve commented on, like so:

So now I can quickly follow up…   I guess Q is still sick, he hasn’t responded yet!

Alternatively, I could have subscribed to the comments feed on the article… but that becomes a royal pain to manage…. over a few weeks you end up with hundreds of subscriptions to particular blog posts that you don’t really need.