Scoble says:

It [new blog service that he can't discuss in detail] also will make comments unneccessary.

I’m not so sure, but am willing to be convinced. I’ve been thinking about how to solve the comment problem for a while but haven’t had any good ideas. As I was discussing with Allen a few days ago, the comment problem has 2 disparate components: server-side and client-side, if you will.

• The server-side component can only be solved by individual bloggers - I feel, for instance, that house of the hanged man solves that problem sufficiently by allowing commenters to subscribe to the following comments of a particular post here, but many bloggers use hosted services and can’t utilize such a solution (Allen being one of those) and moreover it relies on the good will and motivation of each blogger to implement such a solution, leaving readers/commenters out of the decision-making loop.
• The client side of the problem is that a reader or commenter should be able to subscribe to comments on a post even if the blogger’s software doesn’t allow for that. There are obviously potential band-width and content rights issues with this, and any such solution would leave readers/commenters at the mercy of their client-side tools - a Greasemonkey script that did this, for example, would only work for folks who could use greasemonkey; never an ideal solution.

A service solution to the problem would avoid these particular traps, but has problems of its own:

• BoingBoing uses a version of this for their comments, providing on each post a link to the Technorati cosmos for all bloggers that have commented on that URL. But if I link instead to the root of the BoingBoing site, or to the link that they’re discussing, or to an anchor within the page (if they ever offered those), my comments wouldn’t show up there. And I have to have my blog registered and pinging Technorati correctly, and even then there may sometimes be problems with Technorati indexing my posts correctly. Further, I don’t like having to navigate to another page to see that information. As far as I can see, any service-type solution would have similar weaknesses - although I could envision a way that a service could get around the navigate-to-a-new-page problem.
• As Scoble says:
  

  all you need to do to leave a comment on my blog is to have a blog yourself and link to it

  opening the obvious questions 1)”What if I don’t have a blog?” and 2)”What if I don’t want to link to the post, or to take the time to write a blog post about it?”

All in all, I don’t see a service-oriented solution to the comment problem working well enough to replace comments as they are. Except perhaps for Scoble, who has enough trouble keeping his comments up and running and may be willing to limit comments on his blog to bloggers only.

Other bloggers commenting on Scoble’s post can be found here

Slightly later: this post is a good example of why at least Technorati doesn’t work very well for this. My Technorati cosmos link directly above includes the anchor to Robert’s post instead of to his whole page for 2005-06-30. My post links directly to that anchor on Robert’s blog. However, it seems that Technorati strips the anchor from their search, meaning that my post isn’t indexed as discussing his post. As work-around I linked Scoble’s name to today’s page, to see if I can get Technoarti to recognize it.