The official coComment weblog

coComment started, as a company, in January 2007. coComment, the concept, is significantly older having first seen the light of day as a proof of concept demo at the Lift 06 conference.

In that time, we have transformed what was a concept into a company with a very different (and much larger) product set, built a team of 22 people and acquired over 1.15million users.

However, in all that time, we’ve not made a cent/penny/grivna in revenues nor have we sought to do so. The funding from coComment has come solely from its investors.

For us, 2008 is a critical year. It is the time when we need to go from ‘promising startup’ to ‘viable business’ and a key part of that is starting to generate revenues. We want to do so in a manner that does not alienate our users nor distract them from what they want to do with coComment.

We have therefore started running advertising on the site, in our feeds to others sites and in coComment windows. I know, of course, that most people would prefer to see advertising-free services but the reality is, of course, that ultimately we cannot provide the service to you without generating revenues.

I also want us to offer our users the opportunity to have an ad-free service for an annual fee of $5.

I’ve seen some comments on other blogs … but not many. I therefore wanted to raise the issue here so that everyone has an opportunity to respond and let us know what they think. We’re all in favour of conversations so we’re happy to start one about this and get your views.

Best regards,

Matt.

The coComment team have been at re:publica (re:publica) in Berlin this week.

What a great conference; lots of really thought provoking presentations, some highly entertaining ones and a lot of fun too.

We were here to, amongst other things, get some feedback on the coComment 2.0 Concept. Many thanks (und freundliche Grüsse) to everyone who attended our workshop and many thanks for the feedback. As mentioned during that session, we will be providing a beta test environment as we move closer to actually deploying coComment 2.0 and we are inviting people to volunteer as beta testers. Just a quick note on this one though, we are only going to be able to support a limited number of testers since otherwise we’ll overload our test environment.

I was also introduced to the wonders of PowerPoint Karaoke (Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur). This is one of the best, and funniest, things I’ve ever encountered. The concept is simple; randomly downloaded powerpoints on topics such as “Say ‘Yes’ to Dorsten” and, my selection, “History of European Bread Culture” are picked and you have to present to them in front of an audience and a judging panel in the style of Pop Idol/X Factor. As I was the only English speaking participant the judges were very kind to me. I haven’t laughed so loud in ages and the winner, Jan Schmidt, wowed us all with details of the oversize women’s show market on ebay ! Trust me, you had to be there.

And I won third prize ! I think it was favouritism towards the sole englishman but I am now the proud posessor of a comprehensive how-to guide to the internet. It will, I’m sure, fill in the many holes in my technical understanding of html/xml/php etc - once I learn enough German to actually read it.

So, once again, a big thank you to the organisers for having us and freundliche Grüsse to everyone at re:publica - particularly for your understanding of those of us with less than fluent German skills. It always embarasses me that, at an event in Germany, I can stand up and speak in English and be understood - I very much doubt that the converse would be possible in the UK.

Matt.

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

I’ve dropped hints with a few people that there were exciting things to come within coComment. There is still much we cannot say, but here’s a fist tidbit (and not the least): we’re hiring.

We are looking for an individual with skills in product design, familiar with the blogging/commenting space from both a technical and user community perspective. Fluent in English and at least one other European language.

Your remit will be to work closely with the Marketing and Technology teams to formulate and lead the development of CoComment.

You will need to be flexible, fast thinking, passionate about the blogging/commenting space and with the ability to take creative thought and turn it into deliverable product.

In return, CoComment offers a creative, supportive and fast-moving environment, the opportunity to join a rapidly growing company and equity incentives.

Please email matt at cocomment dot com with covering letter and CV, detailing current and expected remuneration.

As a personal note, I’d like to add that there are chances I’ll be reporting to the Chief Architect. It’s of course not yet 100% certain as there are many unknowns, but here I am, probably posting the ad for my future boss’s position…

Crossposted on Climb to the Stars.

technorati tags:joboffer, cocomment, hiring, job, chiefarchitect, architect, design, software, blogging, commenting, web2.0, management, manager, ad, announcement

We regularly use Technorati to keep up-to-date with what the blogosphere is saying about coComment. Here are a few things that caught my attention today.

• Dave Lee uses mysyndicaat to aggregate conversations from coComment. These conversations are related to the posts a community of bloggers wrote on The Big Question for October.
• Makeesha asks her friends on Blogger to avoid using pop-up comments so that coComment works well on them (thanks! we didn’t dare ask!)
• A couple of our hebrew-speaking users have discovered the meta-commenting feature.
• Ziki uses allow users to use coComment for their “latest comments” feature. (Looks like an interesting service but I can’t tell you more because I couldn’t sign up, unfortunately). (Arghl. Don’t do round-up posts when you’re over-tired. — Steph)
• Widgetbox sounds very neat. WordPress users already have widgets (there’s a Wordpress coComment widget of course), but what about bloggers who use other blog tools, like Blogger? Try out Widgetbox, and try out the Widgetbox coComment plugin. Then blog about it. We’ll be reading.
• Once again, it seems that coComment has kept proof of questionable comment removal trace of a comment removed by mistake. (My excuses. Blame my spotty German. — Steph)
• The coComment Enhancer plugin is mentioned on the WordPress podcast.

technorati tags:blogosphere, news, cocomment, posts, wordpress, ziki, widgetbox, plugin

Here at coComment, we quite like these commenting tips given by Reg Adkins over at Lifehack. I personally like the opening paragraph very much:

Posting a comment on someone’s website is like walking into their dining room and pulling a chair up to the table. If it’s your dining room table it can be a bit of a shock when someone shows up.

Read the rest of Reg’s suggestions, and let us know what you think. Do you agree? Disagree? Do you have other tips for being a “good commenter” that you would like to share with us?

technorati tags:commenting, comments, etiquette, manners, guidelines, suggestions, howto, blogging

The Maxthon browser (which is built upon the Internet Explorer engine, but provides all sorts of cool features) is now shipped with its coComment plugin.

The Maxthon coComment plugin adds a toolbar button that works like the bookmarklet, and also provides an easy link to the coComment home page and your conversations page.

Congratulations on releasing the first browser including a coComment button by default!

technorati tags:browser, maxthon, cocomment, plugin, bundle, download

John Cass tells us how coComment is making him discover people. Here’s what he says:

As I write comments on various blogs and track those conversations I start to come across the same people on different blogs. The value of CoComment in part is in helping me to quickly identify those people who share many of my interests. CoComment really is a social network that you can use to find people who share your same demographics and psychographics. In fact I’d suggest instead of calling social networks, demographic search engines, call them psychographic search engines.

What about you? Have you had a look at your coComment community? Has coComment encouraged you to get to know bloggers who participate in the same conversations as you better?

At coComment, we make a distinction between:

• your neighbours, who comment on the same subjects as you;
• your favourites, people you have explicitly chosen;
• your subscribers: those who have marked you as a favourite.

Do these distinctions seem relevant to you? Do you use them? We’d like to hear from you.

technorati tags:cocomment, socialsoftware, favourites, citation

Business 2.0 published a compilation of Web 2.0 companies around the world, and names coComment “the lazy blogger’s best friend”!

Check it out on page 108 of the August edition, available here!

We are delighted to be part of Europe’s next wave of cool startups, along the likes of Wikio, Netvibes, Plazes, Allpeers, Last.fm and the others

We are getting reviews from all over the world. Hopefully they are positive (sometimes it is a bit hard to tell!). Do you speak Korean, Dutch or Chinese? Here are a few links:

• coComment se renueva
  coComment es, tal vez, uno de los servicios más interesantes que hay para poder seguir todas las conversaciones que se generan en los comentarios de los blogs y, al mismo tiempo, uno de los servicios que recién ahora está empezando a ser usado por los blogs en español.
• coComment が自動トラッキング機能をサポート
  コメント管理サービス coComment が、ついに自動トラッキング機能 (自動クロール機能) をサポートした。
• CoComment vernieuwd
  En is nu stukken beter dan co.mments. En met handige Firefox extensie. Tijd om te switchen.
• Cocomment reloaded
  Cocomment kommt heute mit einem neuen Release mit einigen neuen interessanten Funktionen. So kann man in Zukunft auch Diskussionen abonnieren, an denen man sich nicht aktiv beteiligt und die Killerapplikation schlechthin, man kann jede beliebige Website kommentieren.
• 用js丰富你的书签功能
  美味书签、 furl、cocomment等服务，都具备利用书签按钮”一键提交”的功能，其实一点儿也不复杂，只要你掌握了在收藏夹中使用js的方法，就可以为你的书签工具栏增色不少。
• coComment
  Je suis dans ma journée applications. Celle-ci permet de centraliser vos conversations sur Internet, avec un suivi mais surtout, Cocomment vous informe quand de nouvelles réponses apparaissent.
• Nuove funzionalità per coComment
  Nuove funzionalità sono state annunciate per coComment, il servizio gratuito che permette di centralizzare la gestione dei propri commenti lasciati nella blogosfera. Ora il servizio è disponibile in cinque lingue, italiano compreso.

It is really great to see that we have users from all over the world. That’s the magic side of this business

Reminder: you can make coComment compatible with your language very easily! It only takes 3-4 hours of work to get eternal respect from your fellow compatriots using the service! Do like Roberto (Italian version) and Ralph (German version), contact us!