The official coComment weblog

We were alerted to a potential risk over the weekend thanks to the diligence of two users. Many thanks to Tom Biro (Click Here)
and John Ratcliffe-Lee (Click Here).

Although, as was pointed out, this shouldn’t happen and site security policy should prevent it we would just like to remind users that we do provide privacy solutions to protect you.

We allow you to Blacklist any site to prevent coComment storing any comments you enter there. We also offer you the option to recommend the site for inclusion in the global blacklist. No comments for any site on the global blacklist will be stored by coComment for any user.

The functionality looks like this:

Select Blacklist (highlighted in the screen grab) and the Blacklist dialogue window opens. You can then Blacklist that site for yourself and/or also recommend that the site be blacklisted for all users.

As ever, would be delighted to get your feedback on any improvement you think we could make here.

Happy, and safe, commenting.

The coComment Team

As the leading repository of all the great, good, bizarre, disgusting, wild, extreme, funny and downright strange comments that you all make we thought that the following suggestion we recently received made a log of sense …

“You guys have got loads of comments and conversations going on … but which are the great ones … the ones I really want to know about but don’t now ? I use coComment as a functionality tool but I also really want to use it to find interesting content. How about I and a bunch of others let you know if something is really good and you then highlight it ?” – AnnaNonymous

Well, we thought this was a great idea BUT we thought it was kind of hard to decide what categories to suggest. After all, a simple … “Best of this month’s Comments” is kind of hard to pick and probably not particularly interesting.

The other thing that occurred to us is that we’re not necessarily the best people to be picking the winners anyway. So, we’re looking for nominations for ‘celebrity’ bloggers and commenters to judge and for what the categories should be.

We came up with the following, probably rather lame, suggestion list:

The Britney coCoNut – For the strangest and most bizarre comment/blog of the month

The Bush coCoNut – For the stupidest and most insane comment on a serious political issue (or blog – yes, whoever you are, we saw your comment on Hilary’s site)

The Blair coCoNut – For the most egregious attempted manipulation of the media for your own ends

The Osborne coCoNut – For the maddest comment

The Douglas Adams coCoNut – For the most gratuitous use of the word ‘Fuck’ in a serious conversation or blog (sorry, couldn’t help it ….)

So, are these lame or what ? Let us know your suggestions for the categories and the judges (you can nominate yourself) and we’ll get this running at once.

Cheers,

coCo Team

coComment, the leading window to internet conversations, wants to inform its users about a major new version of its technology. Among other improvements, the new version includes two key developments: integration with Technorati and Privacy functionality.

Technorati Integration

The Technorati feature is a seamless integration of coComment with Technorati profiles. The integration allows you to: own and manage your own blog and blogs you’ve claimed on Technorati in coComment (i.e. edit blog and conversation titles; obtain comments in the blogosphere and on blogs indexed by Technorati, etc.). The integration also enables you to get your coComment profile associated with the content page returned by Technorati (sidebar) and to get all comments you post indexed by Technorati.

We believe users will find these features useful as they provide increased visibility and ease of managing and editing both blogs and comments. We encourage your feedback regarding these features as well as input on other functionalities we could implement in order to serve users’ needs.

Privacy Function

The power of the coComment extension is that it allows you to automatically track your comments without having to do anything. Privacy settings allow you to mark certain sites or areas as ‘private’. This means that coComment will not track any comments you’ve entered there.

To activate this, visit the site you want to mark as ‘private’ and click on the ‘Blacklist’ button. You can then delete all existing comments, block any new ones and mark this site as ‘private’ for the future.

We also offer the ability for you to propose that the site/area should be on the global ‘Blacklist’ which means that no comment will be collected there for any coComment user.

coComment announces company formation, investment by Swisscom AG and Netage Inc (Japan) and recruitment of senior team.

coComment, a leading internet application for comment tracking, has secured $1.5million in funding from Netage Inc of Japan and a significant co-investment from Swisscom AG of Switzerland.

coComment, which was launched in February 2006 as an exploration project by Swisscom’s R&D division – Swisscom Innovations, has grown rapidly in the intervening period and reached the point at which Netage and Swisscom have agreed to fund a commercial entity to take the technology forward.

coComment is delighted to announce that Matt Colebourne, latterly of LunarStorm and MIVA, joins the company as CEO and Christophe Lemoine, latterly of blue-infinity (a key technology partner in coComment’s development), joins the company as CTO.

Matt Colebourne commented “The comment and blogging space is the fastest growing part of the internet at present. As the massive growth of YouTube, MySpace, Flickr and others has shown, the nature of the internet is changing. It’s about the individual and the conversation around the content as much as the content itself. However, at present, it’s very hard sometimes to participate in that conversation; particularly when it extends across many sites. coComment is perfectly positioned to fulfil that need; we empower the user whilst keeping them on the sites in question.”

Christophe Lemoine continues “We’ve proven the value of coComment by achieving significant user growth simply by listening to what our users want from the technology and addressing those needs. That will continue but the rate of delivery will massively increase as we invest heavily in development.”

www.cocomment.com

About coComment

coComment is the leading provider of comment and blog access, aggregation and tracking technology. Integrating with all the major commenting and blogging platforms, coComment also offers site owners the facility to offer commenting around their content.
coComment, having secured funding, is now embarking on rapid growth and further development of the technology.

Forward-looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements that are based upon current expectations and involve certain risks and uncertainties. Words or expressions such as “plan,” “intend,” “believe” or “expect’” or variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, some of which are beyond our control and difficult to predict and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements, including (1) our ability to successfully execute upon our corporate strategies, (2) our ability to develop and successfully market new products and services, (3) our ability to participate in the growth opportunities available in our market, (4) the ability of our products to generate revenue for our partners, (5) our ability to attract and retain qualified key personnel, and (6) the potential acceptance of new products in the market.

Contact Details

Matt Colebourne, CEO
+44 7717 416825
matt@cocomment.com

Marco Chong, Board Director
Marco.chong@swisscom.com

A couple of weeks back, I was having a chat with Max, one of our new developers. We were discussing improvements that could be made to the “My Conversations” page, and the conversation drifted towards RSS feeds (well, feeds in general). I started thinking about how feeds could be made more useful for conversations (because, frankly, I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of trouble following conversations through feeds). I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you, and you can let me know what yours are.

• When they are blog posts, feed items are reasonably independent from one-another. You can read a single feed item and it makes sense on its own.
• When the elements of a feed are parts of a conversation, however, that changes. Whether the conversation is a comment stream on a blog post or the replies to a forum topic, the different elements in it are closely linked, and it’s difficult to understand one of them without seeing it really in context. Context here is two things: the initial article, forum topic, or even web page which sparked the conversation; the other comments which led the conversation to that point, or at least a number of the comments immediately preceding it in the conversation.

Now, if you keep that in mind, you’ll understand that feeds are pretty adequate for following:

• a series of loosely joined articles (blog posts)
• a single conversation

They are not the ideal solution for following multiple conversations simultaneously.

However, the very reason one would want to subscribe to conversation, usually, is because there is more than one to follow. (If you’re just having one conversation, or read only one blog, subscribing becomes less useful.)

So, how could we organise comment/conversation feeds to make them more usable?

The main problem I have with multiple conversation feeds is that the conversations are all mixed up. Unless I check the feed very frequently and have all the ongoing conversations present in my mind, and they’re not too busy, the main function of the feed will be to let me know which conversations have been updated, and give me a handy link to go and check them out on the original webpage.

I think a conversation feed should do more than that. Here’s how I, as a user, would like to see the conversations I’m following.

• First, make the conversation the feed element, instead of the comment. I know this sounds bad, because we expect a feed element to be atomic, and a conversation is clearly not atomic — a comment or conversation element is. But from the reader’s point of view, the unit of meaning here is the conversation. As I said above, a comment alone usually has little value.
• Second, provide context. If there are two new comments in a conversation I’m following, give me those two, plus 2-3 older ones to help me remember where I left off. Give me the title of the blog/forum and the post/topic name. And give me a link to the original publication page if I want to read everything.

Obviously, this can’t be done with a traditional RSS/atom implementation. You need something somewhere to count the new comments, distribute them into their respective conversations, and package it all neatly. This is where I see a service like coComment step in.

Do you think that presenting conversation feeds in this way would make them more useful for you? What other ideas would you have?

I’d like to stress that this is just my personal thinking. We’re not planning to replace the current coComment feeds by this system (and if that were to happen, we’d leave the “traditional” ones in too, I’m certain).

So. How would you like to read your conversation feeds?