Not completely useless, but communicating to users via sidebar is unreliable. They see that information at random if there are more than a couple if items. - Bryan Landers

maybe I'll try cutting out everything from my sidebars... - Taylor Davidson

Try to measure the change if you can (Goog analytics?). I want to know more about your thoughts on how your comments from other blogs/etc aren't anywhere on your site. Not sure yet how best to display everything, but that's effort and value not accounted for. - Bryan Landers

I'd be interested in your ideas on how to better display comments and externally created content. Using Backtype's widget or RSS feed is probably a great start... I'm sure @golda and @omakase would agree - Taylor Davidson

Cue @golda or @omakase! (they must be having Christmas or something...they certainly never sleep!) - Bryan Landers

Yeah widget is good start and much better than nothing. It still suffers from sidebaritis though. I'm starting to think the key is in searching and tags...keep ya posted ;) - Bryan Landers

re the bt widget, we've had some requests to display an extract of the comment in addition to the post title (similar to the search widget on http://mm.urbantwelve.com/). thoughts? i think it would become too noisy like that. - Mike Montano

you can hax our widget css too -- I did a bit on http://cg.urbantwelve.com/ -- but I think the FF widget would be better if you're interested in all externally created content - CG

Haha! You guys rock - that was plenty quick! I'll comment more when I'm not typing on my iPhone...but, I think that it's great having the excerpt because that's the content created by the commenter (the title is not, although that gives context). Not sure how it's set up, but users could enter the number of chars they want to allow...more soon ;) - Bryan Landers

(I'm amazed at how much you guys listen and respond, no, I don't think you guys sleep.) Actually, the backtype widget will be better than FF, and figuring out a way to integrate will be on the list of Jan.... - Taylor Davidson

Posted some thoughts re: Backtype widget here: http://bit.ly/11U9dx - Bryan Landers