CoComment is experimenting with a new way for people to keep track of all of the comments they leave on various blogs.
To use CoComment, a user must install a bookmarklet on their browser and use that bookmarklet, instead of the blog interface, to leave a comment. Users then have a centralized place where all comments are located, and can push that content onto their own blogs with a widget. Commenters are also notified as the conversation continues, so they do not have to continue to go back to the original post. See the “learn more” area of CoComment for more information on this.
It hasn’t launched yet, but Robert Scoble is already impressed.
I may disagree on this one. The idea is great, but I don’t want to have to use a third party service to actually leave the comment. Also, the service does not centralize my trackback comments (comments I choose to leave by posting on my own blog). And I wonder how well it will actually work across all of the various blog platforms.
Nevertheless, the core idea is a great one, and I would very much like to view all of my comments, and other bloggers’ comments, on one centralized page.
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This is a problem, and also why people generally should post their thoughts on their blogs. But, of course everyone posts comments. So what I do, for now, is generally when I comment somewhere, and I want to follow what’s said after that, is put a link on my weblog to the post. If it was interesting enough to leave a comment, I figure, it’s interesting enough to blog it. It helps to have a linkblog instead of one that requires each post to be a story with its own headline. Another thing that’s going to go by the wayside in the coming years, imho.
Dave, you are one of the Blogosphere’s centers of gravity, so of course you post most of your thoughts on your blog. But the majority of bloggers with unknown blogs will live out their urge to be part of the conversation on other people’s blog, buy leaving comments.
Ooops, sorry for shouting, forgot to close the emphasis:-(
Jason Kottke did this for a while with his blog, he would repost his comment, and trackback to the original post.
I met some guys from CoComment last week at http://www.lift06.org. And I really think their project is a big idea.
Like you wrote, the core idea is a great one and it very confortable to have a view all of my comments. Plus, the community can see theirs.
Nice job!
I love the idea of being able to keep track of all my comments on other blogs because I have no idea where I leave comments unless someone clicks through to my site.
I think they could make this process easier by making it a firefox extension and whatever the IE equivalent is instead of a bookmarklet.
If any of you speak Spanish… http://mycomments.idslab.com.ar
Soon in English
With coComment you do *NOT* need another interface to leave your comments.
Just go to the comment form (on blogger.com, wordpress, MySpaces, TypePad etc.) and click the bookmarklet button. Like this, the comment form of the blog service will be enhanced and the comment you enter will be collected automatically be coComment.
We attempted to solve this problem differently, using RSS: http://www.commentstrack.net. We then got stuck but I still believe that there’s a way to do this, other than centralizing comment-posting.
I am coCommenting this very comment. For someone like me who reads a fair amount of blogs but doesn’t (yet?) have a blog of his own, it’s a great tool. I often post comments in a blog and then forget to ever go back. Who knows what I might be missing? But now coComments gives me an RSS feed of all conversations in which I’ve participated. So I’ll be following this one too…
More info on the ideas behind cocomment:
http://www.ballpark.ch/blog/english/513/cocomment
… to say nothing about how spammers will try to use CoComment as a Trojan horse for spreading their crap … see my Trackback above for my reasoning here.
I am also coCommenting this. If I still use it in a month it is a winner.
This is not a new approach at all.
Blogia.com, a blogging platform in Spanish has a service already doing this, named audasti.com. That web site is not open to the public yet, but Blogia users can use it anyway. Also in Zoomblog we were working on that a while ago and stopped because we figured someone else would probably was going to do it anyway and we were busy with other things. Later I’ve found out of even more sites doing the exact same thing.
Bottom line: using a bookmarklet to post comments though a third party system is simply not a novel idea. That’s not to say cocomment is a bad thing (the more, the merrier) but like I said, there’s nothing new to this approach. In fact, there are twists to this approach but still using bookmarklets that might work even better.
Good idea, I am often leaving comments on blogs and forgetting to check later if there were any responses.
The method I’ve been using to track my comments is tagging them using del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/chrisyeh/yehcomment
However, this doesn’t solve the other big problem with comments, which is that I’m not automatically notified when someone responds to one of my comments.
Ideally, I’d receive an email or better yet, get notification via RSS when a post that I’ve commented on gets another comment (it’s probably too much to ask to find out when somebody specifically references my own comment).
…or someone like me who reads a fair amount of blogs but doesn’t (yet?) have a blog of his own, it’s a great tool. — czheng
Now, that’s interesting! Think about it. Czheng is an active “commenter” participating in conversations. Now, the Next Big Thing would be for coComment to have “virtual blogs” which are automaticlly created from the conversations they monitor. The more control they give the commenter, the more seamless the transition would be between commenting on other people’s blogs, and having those comments begin to populate your own blog automatically. Of course, you could then “tailor and edit” the content you’ve already (via commenting) put on your virtual blog.
In fact, I’m amazed that until now, there haven’t been a whole lot of tools to integrate the conversation into the owner’s blog. Virtual blogs. Hmmmm.
In fact, coComment already has something very close to this. I can aggregate my coComment blog comments as a separate RSS feed (which I just did this morning). This is getting closer to the total integration dream.
OK, had my first coComment glitch. My glitch actually. I forgot to click my coComment bookmarklet on that last post! I can see that will happen a lot! Needs to be a bit more automatic.
now all they need is a web2.0 browser something that takes 1 page and lets you view other pages with it add google adds on that specail page and you have ad revenue
on topic
isnt that the same thing that millions of games tagging service does
I’m commenting using it. Not perfect, but very nifty so far…
This is a fundamental need as yet unmet. Kudos to the cocomment team. With this service all my daily links are at del.icio.us, all my pics at Flickr, my blog posts on my blog and all my comments on cocomment
Since I can pull all of those into my wordpress blog using plugins, now finally my blog can be a full representation of my virtual social life (ofcourse excluding my emails)
I’m liking it. It will take a while for me to get in the habit of using, but it’s about time a service has been created for tracking comments.
I wrote this ( http://th1nk.com/projects/ideas/ ) a bit ago. Anyone interested in making it happen? peter@th1nk.com
A few months ago i wrote a high level PRD of what this feature could be. but tracking comments is definitely a great idea
http://ouriel.typepad.com/mybl....._of_y.html
Now I shouldn’t have any problems following disscusions around the place that interest me.
> I may disagree on this one. The idea is
> great, but I don’t want to have to use a
> third party service to actually leave
> the comment.
You do not use a third party service to leave a comment… it is just sent to the service.
Let me know if you want to test it, I have some invitations…
The tool might not be perfect and room for improvement but this is definitely a step in the right direction!
The fact that the other commenters also have to be cocomment users and that cocomment is in closed beta so you can’t really encourage others to try to make use of it really makes it hard to see the value in the service at the time being. In fact, short of it becoming ubiquitious, it will always fail to sufficiently solve the problem of knowing if and when your comments have been responded to. All you’ll really know is if other cocomment users have responded, and you’ll still have to visit the site to see if non users have responded. Really doesn’t provide what we need, something more akin to a rss feed that you can sub to for comments on every post you make.
Yeh above mentions a tag he uses in del.icio.us. That’s the bookmarklet to use, no need for anything else: leave the comment, then bookmark it. There you have it, all comments tracked. And there is some sort of convention to use the ‘mycomments’ tag to do that. Check:
http://del.icio.us/tag/mycomments
Yes, if someone has an invitation, please email me one.
Hmmm, Do I see a better TagCloud using the new PCT index? (P)ost(C)omment(T)alkback
I want to try too! if someone want to invite me…thanks.
A few more codes in this post’s comments:
http://www.ballpark.ch/blog/english/513/cocomment
Test (sorry, I love you TechCrunch)
Last time.
Curious… I was thinking about an application just like this. But without bookmarklets.
My idea will use GreaseMonkey as host, hooking up the “submit” button.
Actually, what I really like with this is not only that it makes it easier to track your own comments, but you can see where other people you’re following are commenting. If you’re interested by somebody’s blog, it’s likely you’ll be interested in reading his/her comments, isn’t it?
Idea: could this be integrated with some form of social/contacts/friends thingy? (very vague intuition there is something to do in that direction — or at least, allow to map relationships between people using coComment based on if they tend to comment on the same posts, or have conversations together?
I got a key at http://www.ballpark.ch/blog/english/513/cocomment, and I’ve got to say, it’s quite good. You don’t need to comment over another interface, and it’s really easy. It does something I was already waiting for a long time.
However, I think it will maybe be susceptible for spam. I don’t know what they’ll do about that.
Also, their FAQ says that if you forgot to click on the bookmarklet, that you can select the comment and click on it. But doesn’t this permit someone to make someone else’s comment seem his?
They had to remove the feature temporarily because it was too buggy, but it will be back.
Better solution to save you from forgetting to click on the bookmarklet (I’m a forgetful girl): the greasemonkey script for firefox. Details here:
http://www.cocomment.com/teamblog/?p=14
comments are great but get lost in the conversation. I wish that I could leave a comment and automatically post it on my blog and trackback.
On behalf of the whole coComment team, I just wanted to thank everyone who’s been commenting here (and thanks to Michael for the original post!). We’re really excited by all the feedback we’re getting, and we’re working hard to get the service fully open as soon as possible (it’s only closed until we’re sure it won’t crash under heavy use).
Thanks again and happy coCommenting!
I was able to grab an invite as soon as you posted this news Michael.
Thanks!
See also X-Comments. A plugin created for WordPress.
Download here:
http://www.xcomments.com/
See it in use here (right sidebar, “My X-Comments”):
http://dailydoseofdave.net/
I’ve now had the opportunity to test the service out, and I’m pretty damned impressed.
It’s an interesting approach but the interface needs a facelift to reduce clutter. A direct link to the commented blog would also be more convenient.
It’s good to see Michael’s racking up even more comments than usual what with all the beta CoCommenters out there.
One thing that’s missing, IMHO, is the ability to register your comments with several IDs. I’d like to have my personal ID, but also as part of a group ebiquity ID. We could put code to link the ebiquity group ID comments on our ebiquity group blog.
Great to see all these pros and cons here! I think it is a next step in tracking conversations. That will become more and more important. It should be integrated in blogsoftware but as long as this is not the case, this is a great app.
This sounds good. The tricky thing is remembering that you have to (1) type comment (2) hit cocomment bookmarklet (3) leave comment.
Andrew: use the greasemonkey script with FireFox, and you won’t have to remember to do anything http://www.solutionwatch.com/3.....cocomment/
Also, it’s not necessary to hit the bookmarklet after you’ve typed your comment — you can hit it just before you submit too.
I dont see enough people commenting on journals. If I find an article interesting I will comment on it to show my appreciation. I will also sometimes blog about it in my asides columb if it was that interesting to provoke more thought on the matter.