I had an idea a while back to marry IM bots to blog commenting, and thought the name IMents might be cute (kind of along the lines of lichen as deriving from Freddy Fun-guy and Alice All-gal takin' a likin' to each other).

Much to my delight, and totally independently from my own idea (which I never even mentioned to anyone, actually), Zacker has created and added an AIM Comments mechanism on his blog, and it is excellent and like everything I had imagined (via xian).

I hope that as Zacker releases his code, he and/or others will add support for Jabber, other IM protocols, and SMS. I think IM for commenting is super duper double extra right on.

(Add somethingme to mix, and maybe a RSS-IM gateway, and I imagine a medium of online conversation based around blogging, but quite different than blogs, that will be very interesting.)