gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

Yes, I've seen this on one blog, ever. Unfortunately I can't recall it as it was a year or two ago now, but the messages appeared in the comments simply as "[private message]" and still had the author name + date.

I've seen this on blogs, including once on an MT site, but in that case the guy rolled his own code. It isn't a tough feature to implement, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for it.

Wordpress has a private post feature where readers have to register on level x or above to see a post (and if you don't see it you don't comment on it, obviously). So you know that a post published at level x will only get viewed by a group you trust. That's a good way to keep the concept of a discussion or community but with an automatic control element when it's needed.

Wouldn't private comments sort of violate the idea of open communications that blogs and such are all about? Why not just send an email?

It's not hard to implement on Movable Type.

In the comment listing template:

[$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$]

(replace the [ ] with the appropriate less-than or greater-than symbol)

People put in their e-mail addresses, you get them in the e-mail MT sends you to notify you of a comment, but their address doesn't show up on your site which helps cut down on spam to them by eliminating e-mail harvesting.

HTH,
Woodstock

Yes, as the other commenters have noticed. I believe there are a range of ways (depending upon the blog software) to arrive at these or similar dynamics.

David,
I think that a private comment is warranted sometimes and I like the idea of providing the option. It wouldn't mean that all comments are emails instead but that you could choose to flag a comment to just go to the author.

This is the sort of thing that would also be useful for an internal blog. Maybe for something like a quick survey.

Or as a topical example, lets say that I post something in violation of Microsoft's trade secrets, MS isn't going to post a public comment telling me to take something down. They might send me an email or make a phone call if its easy to do so and if no such options are available then they're going to get frustrated and upset.

This is of course, assuming that they're learning something from Mr.Scoble over there.

I realize that this is a loaded example but I think it shows that it can't hurt to provide various ways for people to get in touch with you about what you write.

Have you pinged http://www.lazyweb.org with this request? Worth a try if not, I should think.

Although it doesn't support private comment threads, Livejournal does facilitate conversations in the comments section (including threading for comments). I've frequently ended up in conversations that run over 20-30 comments, often with multiple parties.

comments on my WordPress blog are moderated. There isn't a box to mark a comment as private but people use the comments for private messages to me quite often.