coComment

If you read this blog by visiting it (as opposed to using your RSS reader), you may notice, on the right under the link to my profile, a small box that has some links and what appear to be comments in it. The box is from a new web application called coComment, which aims to help you keep track of all the comments you make on blogs.

So far it’s been very simple to use. To ‘capture‘ all the comments you make, you need to first install a bookmarklet in your browser. Then, once you have the bookmarklet, all you need to do everytime you make a comment on a blog is click the bookmarklet, then click submit, and coComment gets a record of your comment. Very easy. I can see a few minor problems with this at this stage:

1. Not all blogging platforms are supported yet. The ones that are supported are the big name ones like Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpaces, TypePad, WordPress, Xanga, even Flickr, as well as a couple I’d never heard of before, Kaywa and Mojira. I hope more get added soon. Note at 5:37pm: Haloscan comments can’t be coCommented! Doh! Update 12 February 10:05am: Comments to Blogger posts that open in a new window can’t be coCommented either… Interestingly, a comment I posted on a Blogger blog that needs to be approved by the blog owner before it will appear on the blog is visible on coComment. I wonder what will happen if the blog owner rejects it.
2. The need to have the bookmarklet installed on every browser you use. I work on about six different computers every week and am going to have to consider whether or not I’m going to install the bookmarklet onto every browser I use. It’s not difficult to do, I guess, but it would be nice to have another option to use when adding a comment. (Although what that other option is, I don’t know – I’ll leave that up to the IT guys to figure out.)
3. This is not really a problem as such, but now I can see all my comments very easily, and because I have chosen to share what I have said on other people’s blogs on my blog (hence the box on the right), maybe I’m going to want to be a little bit more concerned with what I say when I visit others’ blogs. Assuming that is really important of course (is a comment like That chicken does look superb! very erudite??). I don’t make it a point of going around saying rude or inappropriate things on blogs, so that’s not going to be a problem.

These are just minor minor issues of course (and the third one is just my vanity speaking). One feature of coComment that I really like is the blogs page they provide, that lets you see which blogs users have been commenting on, along with all the comments themselves. Currently Robert Scoble’s blog (of Microsoft) has the most comments recorded at coComment.

The service is free, but at the moment you need leave them your email address to get an invitation code allowing you to sign up. I thought it would take ages, but I signed up on Tuesday (I think) and got my code today (Saturday), so if you’re interested go leave them your email address too.

The company behind coComment is a Swiss-based one, and their stated aim is to:

…help bloggers, blog commenters, and blog readers – and eventually all internet users – to make their web based conversations more pleasant, fluent and easy to follow.
More broadly, we strongly believe “web 2.0” – or whatever you want to call the great advances in communication being made possible by today’s internet and communications technologies – is all about conversation. Our goal is to optimize that conversation, and the benefits that open, efficient, and borderless conversation brings to the world.

A noble aim indeed. I think this service has a lot of potential and will use it and watch with interest.

Categories: Web2.0, coComment, conversation