The official coComment weblog

We’d like to announce today the launch of coComment Japan - a fully localized version of the coComment Service for the Japanese market. We noticed early on that a number of users of the main (english language) site were from Japan, and that — coupled with a fact we read in the Economist about Japan being the largest blogging market in the world by daily blog posts — was a big incentive to get a localized Japan version going.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working with our Japanese partners, Netage Inc. (a Japanese internet incubator - part owner of the highly successful social networking service Mixi.jp) to localize the service. After lots of hard work, they launched coComment Japan at jp.cocomment.com today!

• coComment Japan will be part of Netage’s ecosystem of services, which includes;
  • Trend Match (Adsense-like content matching ad network)
  • Saaf bookmark (social bookmarking)
  • Saaf headline (social news)
  • TAGGY (Tag based search engine)
• coComment Japan supports Netage’s identfication service “SaafID”
  (based on OpenID). All of the above services and coComment Japan will be
  accessible through single sign on.
• coComment Japan will support many platforms including most Japanese Blog
  services, such as:
  • Yahoo! Japan Blog
  • livedoor Blog
  • goo Blog
  • cocolog (Nifty)
  • excite exblog
  • Hatena dialy
  • Rakuten blog
  • Ameba blog (CyberAgent)
  • Saaf

  And it will also cover the various platforms already supported by coComment.com.

We’re confident Japan will be a big market for us, and we’d all like to send a big thanks to the Netage team for their great job!

As you certainly have noticed, we’ve had a bit of an outage over the last 24 hours. It was due to a problem at our hosting company, and to the best of our knowledge, it is now resolved.

Around 1pm local time (CET), the firewall started acting out. I’ll spare you the sordid troubleshooting details, but the situation was such that it had to be physically replaced. We then worked with the hosting company to reconfigure it, but despite our efforts — which involved Christophe connecting and doing some setup magic from his plane back from Japan, and many other more sordid details I’ll spare you too — there were still problems with the comment tracking service and our e-mail distribution until this morning. (This also means that if you sent us mail during the last 24 hours, you’re better off sending it again.)

The main thing is that as of 11:30 this morning (still CET) everything is (hopefully!) back to normal. We’re really sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

If some of the conversations you wanted to track didn’t get recorded during the last day, remember you can simply go back to them and check the “Track this conversation” checkbox. If you want to reappropriate any comments you made during the outage, the old trick of selecting the comment and clicking on the bookmark (or toolbar button) still works.

technorati tags:outage, cocomment, service, firewall, problem, apologies, sorry, oops, configuration

Version 0.8.1 was deployed this morning. It doesn’t bring you any new functions, but hopefully better stability (it was majorly a code face-lift).

Let us know if you notice anything funky! (As in, particularly, things that used to work and don’t work anymore — we know it can sometimes happen.)

technorati tags:cocomment, update

CoComment user Carme forgot to tag one of her (?) comments when posting it, and asked if tags could be added later.

Well, good news, Carme. They can. Go to your conversations page, by clicking on the coComment logo the Firefox extension adds on the bottom right of your browser window, for example. Then expand the conversation your comment is in by clicking on its title. And expand the comment you made which you want to tag, also by clicking on it.

You’ll see a list of tags at the bottom, and you can add to those or remove existing ones by clicking on the “Edit” link. This is what it looks like:

technorati tags:howto, tagging, edit, editing, tags, myconversations, cocomment, support