Google kills Blogger Web Comments

Often I find websites where people are just being stupid and need to be told so. In those cases, I don't think relying on the ignorant host of the site to provide a comment page to let me tell him how much of an idiot he is being will really work.

Then there are those cases where I'm wondering about what other people think who are interested in this same site that doesn't allow direct comments to be posted, or where I don't trust the host to not pull down negative comments.

So, what are my options?

Well, I used to make a lot of use of the Blogger Web Comments for Firefox. This was a pretty handy tool that would fetch comments using Google's Blog Search. Since I've recently upgraded to Firefox 3, I thought it was a good time to go look for an update to the plug-in and to see if I could get that functionality back.

Unfortunately, the plug-in is no longer available. This isn't the first time I ran into a brick wall with Blogger Web Comments for Firefox, but it seems they've decided to drop it, rather than fix it.

Hopefully others will still see the promise in this sort of functionality and provide something, but in the short term, I'll be stuck performing copy-paste operations and executing 3-5 clicks to get similar output manually from del.icio.us, Google blog search, and Technorati.

I'll be visiting those search options regularly to see if someone picks up on this feature.