The official coComment weblog

We just put a new navigation on the site. We tried to make it simpler, clearer and prettier. I hope you like it!

PS: you might have to empty your cache to be sure the style sheet updates, so please do quick a ctrl+reload (shift+reload on OSx) in your browser!

How do you use the "Conversations" page? When do you visit it? Do you visit it at all? I find myself going there pretty infrequently, and the links I click on most are the little grey boxes on the right which take me to the blog article I’ve commented upon. What about you?

Do you use the other links? How often? What links would you like to have on that page?

What about the RSS feed? Are you happy with the links it provides?

technorati tags: comments, links, rss, feed, usability

These few days off from school (we have an extended week-end here in Switzerland) are helping me get back on the coCo-track, and I’m picking up some interesting posts and ideas as I make it through the long collection of recent blog articles mentioning coComment.

Cas of Bright Meadow finds herself using coComment to help her identify spam. User SootleDir notes that if you help search engines find your coComment user page, the links on it will get indexed. (Is that good or bad in the long run, I find myself thinking?)

Over at To Encourage and Equip, Tally reflects on how people comment, and tells us coComment helps him not be a drive-by commenter. A drive-by commenter is somebody who leaves a comment on your blog and never comes back.

I like this concept of the drive-by commenter. Personally, I often comment when I read an interesting post on a new blog I just landed on, if only to indicate to the author that I read it, appreciated it, or that it sparked some reflexion in me.

And indeed, the problem is that in pre-coComment days, I usually forgot where I left the comment, and as Tally says, rarely read the answer to my comment unless the author e-mailed me or people visited my site from his/her blog (then it’d show up in my referrer logs, and I’d think of visiting it again).

With coComment, I find my behaviour changing, and I wonder if we’re not going to discover some other type of "drive-by coCommenter" — the bookmarking one: I comment much more easily because of coComment (I know my words won’t get lost, and I know I can follow the conversation). I now find myself commenting much more systematically on new blogs I discover, because I know that it will automatically add them to my coComment user page.

What about you? How do you comment? How has coComment changed your commenting habits? Do you also find yourself using the Your Conversations page as your blogroll? 

technorati tags: cocomment, spam, indexing, commenters, habits, culture, behaviour, drivebycommenting

We just released a new version of coComment that supports multiple languages! Go to your account page and you will see a new drop down menu allowing you to choose between English and French, the first two languages implemented.

And you can even translate the interface in the language you want! It’s actually relatively simple (took me four hours with the French version). Download this Excel spreadsheet and complete it. Email it to us and we will put it online.

We already have English and French online, with a German Übersetzung in preparation thanks to Ralph Inselsbacher.

To avoid doing the job twice I suggest those who wants to translate to either write a comment below, or send us an email on info@cocomment.com. Enjoy!

Robert Jorgenson came up with a cool little widget you can use on your wordpress weblog.

Show coComments

Show coComments creates an unordered list (ul) of your most recent comments on the coComment service. It is intended as a replacement for the official coComment blog box. It uses the blog box configuration of a user specified blog box to propogate the list and is capable of hiding commen text, displaying a link to your coComment RSS feed of either your comments or everyones comments on articles you have commented on, it can also display a header which is customizable.

Thx Robert!

I love using coComment to help me track my conversations at my blog (BusinessBlogWire), at the Know More Media network and around the blogosphere. Here are some of my thoughts on blog comments. I invite you to post your own thoughts here as well!

In December 2005, Steve Rubel discussed the need for improved comment search capabilities, stating that “what we all need is a way to search the entire conversation.” He was especially referring to blog comment search - something still in its infancy - and predicted, “This is where the blog search war will be fought in the months ahead.”

Those bold statements have proven true over the past several months. But I think Steve’s brightest pearl of wisdom in that prophetic post was this: “Blog comments have perhaps more collective wisdom inside them than any other form of consumer generated content. However, as of today, there’s essentially no way to mine them. Who’s going to help us here?”

Fast forward to yesterday, when Steve pointed to a new Nielsen BuzzMetrics study which concludes that blog comments are “often neglected” in blog-related studies and that comments account for as much as 30 percent of the volume of all blog posts. The study also says that offering comments on your blog tends to improve your blog’s visibility in search engines, and that a blog’s popularity tends to correlate positively to the number of comments appearing on it.

What am I getting at? Just this: The time is now for someone to make a blog comment search engine, or at least incorporate comment search into an existing search engine. They could make quite a bit of money by providing this valuable resource for bloggers, advertisers, marketers and professionals alike. coComment has come a long way already toward establishing that type of service, and I hope that coComment (or another tool like it) will soon emerge that will make comment search and tracking available and appealing to the masses. The tipping point for comment tracking is close - the point when its widespread adoption on blogs and by bloggers is secured. Let’s see who takes it past that tipping point - perhaps the coCo-nuts will do it!

Thanks to the coComment team for letting me do this guest post for them. I appreciate the opportunity and will continue to recommend coComment to my Know More Media colleagues and to other bloggers as well.

We are really proud to announce our first guest on the blog here. Please welcome the great Easton from BusinessBlogWire and Knowmoremedia!

Easton is a very active blogger and coCommenter. He is full of ideas for coComment which he communicates to us. So thanks Easton and now the stage is yours!

Did you know you can keep all your comments private? It’s easy, just go to your account settings, click on Hide page, and others won’t be able to access your conversations. Your messages will of course remain in the corresponding threads (they are published on public websites anyway) but the page showing all your conversations won’t be accessible to others.

As you can see on the screenshot you can also exclude your account of the top users list, and disable RSS feeds and boxes. . All these things are not recommended (coComment is based on open conversation after all) but as some of you needed that so here it is!

I was thinking about privacy because we are now working on offering comment-level privacy settings so you can have even more flexibility, and hide that comment on a Dating Weblog you wrote “on behalf of a friend who was too shy”

If you’re an enthusiastic coComment user, you probably wish that more of those participating in the same conversations than you were also using coComment. Sure, we are now capable of tracking comments by anybody if they are made on an integrated site. You’ve probably already set up your own blog to do that.

But what about all the other blogs you are commenting on? And what about neat things like tagging, RSS feeds or Firefox extension notifications your fellow commenters could also take advantage of if they were coComment users? We know many of you have been encouraging readers or fellow bloggers to register, and we really thank you for that.

We’d now like to ask you - the members of the coComment community - what ideas you have to encourage people to open a coComment account, and, let’s face it, discover the real power of blogging as a conversational medium.

What can we do to help you invite your readers into the big coCo-family?

What, in your experience, has convinced people around you to try and use our service?

And if you haven’t got a coComment account yet, or have one and don’t really use it, we’d love to hear from you too. Why haven’t you tried? Why aren’t you using it, or why did you stop using it?

My friend André sent me some pictures of two Portuguese newspaper talking about coComment!

Luckily he took the time to include a translation of what is written. From André’s email:

The first article was printed in the biggest weekend newspaper:

“We almost invariably forget to pay attention to the comments we leave on blogs. This system addresses that and allows us to maintain an organized and sharable list of our comments and answers. It’s a way to follow conversations without losing your archives. A golden service for the “professional” commentators out there in the blogosphere.”

The second article was printed on the Saturday edition of a serious
(non-tabloid) newspaper:

“CoComment is a new service that wants to help users maintaining all the comments they do on blogs in a single place. Instead of returning periodically to the post where the comment was made, the user can keep conversations organized in the blogosphere. After the comment text is inserted, it is duplicated on the CoComment user page and the service starts to follow up all the answers to the comments. Cocomment has another service that allows blog authors to automatically show the comments that the user makes on other blogs, and also a page where you can see comments from all users.”

Obrigado