Second, the "related posts" stuff doesn't show up in RSS. I *can* enable that, but I haven't because I wasn't sure how the community would take that. I hate seeing stuff like that in my feeds. What do you think?

It seems like the syndicated bloggers are now coming through the main SSP feed. This is causing a lot of duplicate content for me as I am already subscribed to the individual blogs. I am interesting in getting SSP news, but I'm not interesting in weeding through a ton of duplicate content just to get the occasional interesting new post.

I understand your concern about syncing comments to SSP which is why I suggested linking back to the original post to see the comments. The "related posts" widget that you mentioned doesn't seem to show up in the SSP RSS feed anyway.

The problem is that if we do that, you lose one of the biggest benefits: the "related posts" thing at the bottom of every post. The idea is that new up-and-coming bloggers will be able to get their posts featured at the bottom of more well-known posters. They would not have that ability if the post details were at each individual site.

I do wish that something like IntenseDebate would have a unified set of comments across both SQLServerPedia and the original blogger's post, but then we have to worry about distributed spam tracking. What if a poster lets spam comments in (and I see that happen all the time on individual blogs)? I can't have the SSP comments chock full of spam.

It's a drawback, and it's a compromise between individual blogging versus syndication. I look at it this way: if you choose to go with another blogging host, like another SQL group of bloggers, then the question would be moot – there'd only be one place for comments, and it wouldn't be the domain you owned. That's how I sleep at night, anyway, ha ha ho ho.