CoComment Preview
CoComment, as most of us know, is a new beta service that tracks your blog comments for you. This incredibly handy service does more than that, though; it allows you to share your conversations with your friends and your blog readers.
The three beta tools that are currently available are:
- Capture
- Capturing is the basic tool. This saves your blog comment into the CoComment system.
- Share
- A useful, easy way to share your conversations on your blog. See this blog’s menu for an active example
- Alert
- An RSS feed that allows you to keep track of replies to your comments
This is only the start, though. There are more tools and options coming down the pipe. Here are some examples that I know of:
- Automated capture to the CoComment system for non-standard blogging enviroments
- The “Alert” feature will be expanded with SMS, EMail, and instant messaging notification.
- The SMS, Email, etc features will allow you to set which blogs, conversations, or people to track with these alerts
- Further customization of CoComment’s tools (fonts and colors for the block displayed on your blog, for example)
The CoComment web site also helps to facilitate the social aspect of comment sharing. They currently provide a tag cloud system that makes it very easy to browse either the most chatty people’s comments or the blogs that are receiving the most feedback. Want to see what’s moving the most fingers? Just click on the huge tag in the middle of the cloud.
Though the tag cloud system is slanted in some ways, such as the Microsoft “geek blog” obviously receiving the most comments at the moment, I can see CoComment being an invaluable service during some sort of emergency. Blogs specifically focused on the emergency would obviously receive the most attention and would be brought to the fore front due to the activity. This would allow others to easily find those blogs, their information, and the people leaving comments there. A major benefit indeed.
How about day-to-day life? First, adding content to a blog is always welcome and this system allows for an easy way to do that. Also, the comment block added to blogs will be a good way to see what folks chat about on blogrolled sites. After all, I’m sure that we’ll see an unintentional correlation between the two.
Don’t want to participate in comment sharing? I can see the system still being useful, and here are a couple of ideas: One, if you’ve left a comment on a support blog you’ll be able to use the Alert feature to know when you’ve received a response. Second, especially chatty people will be able to clean up their bookmarks since CoComment will store it all - or at least most of their conversations - for them.
Obviously, you’re not forced to save your comments to CoComment if you don’t want to. Instead, the system is activated by clicking a simple bookmarklet that you’ve installed into your browser. Click it after you’ve typed your comment and an icon appears next to the Submit button to show you that it’s been saved to CoComment:
The yellow box is what appears if you click on the CoComment icon (which is the “Mysk” thing you see there). Also, click here to see an example of the bookmarklet. That example page automatically detects your browser and gives you an animated gif specific for your browser - neat!
I see CoComment becoming a service used on just about every blog, and I am amazed that none of us thought of starting a service like this before now. It’s so simple and so useful that it should have always been there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re eventually bought by Yahoo. I say this because Yahoo has been buying a lot of community-based services, as we know, and CoComment would certainly fit well into their growing portfolio. Maybe not though. I have nothing to base that on other than a random thought, after all.
Feel free to share your thoughts here. If I didn’t cover something that you think I should have then maybe I can expand on whatever that is.
~Steph
Note: Not the “steph” seen in the cloud tag screen shot.
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