Hi Peter,
This sounds like it would be of good use: I know that Wordpress does this, for example, and I can personally attest that my own Wordpress blog uses this to great effect (I don't have a whole lot of friends talking about Cialis and Rolexes on a day-to-day basis, thank god). Alec and I just taught a workshop at this year's Digital Humanities Summer Institute at UVic, and there was a good deal of interest in seeing the comments functionality expanded. I think Alec has been working on bettering the UI; there has also been some talk (no close looks yet) at possibly porting
Commentpress/
Akismet over in plugin form. Probably non-trivial, but it would be great to have a well-tested, robust comment system that we didn't necessarily also have to maintain. Any thoughts about this direction?
Cheers,
James