The official coComment weblog

The second week was not too hard, you just need to keep a steady pace. I am at 52 pushups and hoping to do more but I get shaky around 52. How are guys doing? How many push ups  are you at?

This weeks winner is Patty Hartwell. You got yourself a sexy coComment shirt headed your way.

Check out her coComment profile.

I am sure there is that day when you wake up and take a look in that tall long mirror and think… I really need to get back to the gym. I had one of those moments today ha. Have you heard of the 100 Pushup Challenge?

It is a program created by Steve Speirs that teaches anyone of any age/level of fitness to do 100 push ups in 6 weeks.

I wanted to invite all my coCommenters to join me in this 6 week adventure of getting in shape and living healthy. During the course of the 6 weeks we will have nutrition bloggers post some healthy recipes and tips for living and I will be giving out some coComment swag.

How do you participate?

1. Register for a coComment account if you do not have one (so I can email you if you are the winner)

2. Post a comment of your status of how many pushups  you can do and what week+day  your on. You can post a comment on any of the blog post pertaining to the contest. (you can also record a video comment power by Seesmic)

3. Every week on Wednesday I will announce some swag being won for the most active user here on our blog.

4. Here is the initial test to get started.

Contest ends on November 19, 2008

This will be fun, get everyone out of thier computer chairs, get fit, and keep the blood flowing. Whoo!

If need help with anything at all you can contact me by email giannii@cocomment.com

Hey coCommenters,

As you know more and more people are asking for help and seeking answers via social networking sites like twitter etc.. I wanted to let you know besides giannii@cocomment.com you can reach me at a couple of these sites; twitter, facebook, friendfeed, and plurk. For immediate gratification I have a couple instant messenger profiles for coComment. On skype (coCommentCM), and aim/msn messenger just add my email as your buddy giannii@cocomment.com.

I’d love to hear what you enjoy about coComment and what you think we can do to improve your experience on our site. Also if you just want to chat shoot me a message. Keep in mind I am on Pacific Standard Time so  I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Talk soon,

-Giannii

Fellow coCommenters,

Want to tell you about our next coComment Challenge, which is starting today! If you have dealt with temper tantrums, sulky teenagers, and dirty diapers, you want to participate in this one and coComment would love to hear your trials and tribulations about raising children.

Visit the following blogs as they will post daily topics and by posting comments have a chance to win cash or prizes equivalent to $150 within our 30-day Challenge:

www.rolemommy.com
www.mainstreetdiaries.blogspot.com
www.mombloggersclub.com
www.mommytrackd.com
www.therojopelo.blogspot.com

Winners will be chosen in each of the following categories:

(1) Best Advice
(2) Most Popular Discussion
(3) Most frequent commenter
(4) Commenter that spurs most discussions
(5) First to comment

It’s exciting day for coComment as our new Community Manager, Giannii, joins us today! Giannii has long history of building communities and products in the social media space. Some of you may know him from Twitter, Facebook, and Seesmic. You’ll be hearing from him a lot in the future. In the meantime, drop him a line at giannii@cocomment.com to welcome him or contact him with any questions you may have!

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