I am all for commenters' rights and bloggers' rights. I don't believe that bloggers own comments. But with previous levels of technology, it has been the general practice that a blogger has the right to delete comments that are deemed inappropriate. I'm OK with that. What I would like, though, is for comments to have a life independent of a blog so that even if the blogger deletes the comment, the comment lives on.
I am eager to be able to start using an independently run commenting system on my TypePad blogs. The advantage of these systems from my point of view is that (1) it makes it easier for a commenter to follow conversations they've participated in and (2) it is easier for readers to follow up on the comments of people whose comments they want more of.
The third advantage I anticipate is that we will get a lot more commenting. Probably the biggest commenters on blogs are bloggers. Now a blogger can regard his comments as a form of microblogging akin to twitter comments. I've been wanting something like this for years. I hate making a comment on a blog and then knowing full well that I'll probably never get back to see what happened next in that conversation.
On the other hand, I have a great experience of commenting on Flickr where I can easily see my comments and any additional conversation that took place thereafter.
I write a lot and, when doing so, I am recording my thoughts. I place some value on those thoughts and ideas. I not only want to be able to reference my thoughts in the future (even when made as public comments), but a comment may serve as an ingredient in a future blog post or other writing project.
Here's hoping that TypePad implements Disqus which may be the best commenting service to date and looks like it would be a big improvement over what we have now. Of course, I can't go there unless there is a way to migrate all the existing comments made on my blogs to this system.
Actually, I should mention that if you are using TypePad's Advanced templates, you can already manually integrate Disqus. Besides the work of doing that integration, you will also have the drawback, as I have learned from firsthand experience, of losing most of the end-user-friendly features of TypePad when you go to the Advanced templates method. You are back to a lot of coding and I find that too labor-intensive for my taste.
One of the advantages of a service like TypePad is they will do most of the heavy lifting associated with integrations like this. That's why I use TypePad and foresake the flexibility I would get from Movable Type or Wordpress. TypePad, I hope you are listening.