The official coComment weblog

Yesterday I was speaking at the CES/Digital Hollywood panel “The Next Generation in Mobile & Broadband Platforms: Social Networks, Widgets, Search, Information, Advertising and Personalization”. We shared the room with an exciting group of speakers and a dynamic audience. It was an interesting discussion covering a range of topics. We talked about widgets on Facebook and social media and shared best marketing & advertising practices in todays’ digital world, which is highly influenced by UGC (Used Generated Content), with comments/conversations being an important part of it.

It was really great to hear from many of you that came up after the panel to tell us that coComment is solving a real need in the marketplace. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our service, so please keep the feedback coming. We look forward to connecting with you soon for integration partnerships and to tell you more about coComment.

Another event that was the highlight of CES for us was the CES “It Won’t Stay in Vegas Blogger Party” hosted by the Parnassus Group. It was fun to meet new bloggers as well as connect with some of the old-timers, like Robet Scoble, Brian Solis, Sarah Meyers, and Tom Foremsky. Some of the new bloggers we met were interestingly enough from corporate-driven blogs, like Disney Imagineering, which is doing some really cool things to interact with their consumers via a series of blogs around their brands.

The party venue was also very interesting one (The Atomic Testing Research Institute), with many unusual and fun toys (for geeks like ourselves), so we picked up some “Space Ice Cream” and an Einstein video … not exactly what one would expect from Vegas, but it made us happy

Thanks you all that stopped by at the party and the panel and we look forward to seeing you next at the AlwaysOn Media conference in NYC on January 28-30th, 2008.

Kristina Serafim & The coComment Team

It’s been a busy week for coComment, migrating to v2 and attending more exciting industry events in SF! Last Monday we were at the Geek Dinner, hosted by Loic Le Meur & Hugh MacLeod. It was fun meeting more bloggers and commenters, not to mention the swanky venue. Now Loic has lived up to the likes of Posh and Becks, having his own US welcome event, sans Tom & Katie

Then last night we were at the Bloggers Connect conference. It was great to see the faces of many bloggers writing about real estate. It made us aware just how many different topics our users write about. And we had a chance to learn a few things about buying condos, mortgage rates, etc.

And last, as you know, our development team is working 24/7 on the migration to v2, so look forward to the new site very soon!

We’re at Innovate Europe this week telling everyone about coComment.

Have met several sites that have now decided to integrate with coComment so expect to see a very rapid rise in the number of conversations available to you on coComment.

We’re also delighted to welcome SevenLoad to coComment … great video content and some very funny conversations too Sevenload Conversations.

Finally, please drop us a line and tell us how you like the new discover and search facilities. Are they what you want to help you find people, sites and conversations ? What else do you want ?

Cheers,

Matt.

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.

Drupal users, this is for you! Olav has been cooking a Drupal module which integrates coComment into your site. It’s been around since July but had problems with comments being submitted upon preview — this is not the case anymore: it has been fixed and the latest integration code used.

Thanks a lot for your work, Olav!

technorati tags:drupal, module, integration, olav, thirdparty

Here we are! The page explaining how to integrate coComment into your blog has just been updated. You’ll see some changes in the javascript integration code — but not to worry, the old code still works.

Let me take this occasion to clarify again what this whole “integration” thing is about. When coComment captures comments left on blogs, it needs to catch all sorts of information: blog name and URL, comment author’s name, comment content, etc. Clicking on the bookmarklet or using the extension tells coComment to do that.

When coComment is integrated into a blog, two things happen:

• the different variables coComment needs are given to it directly
• coComment is given the power to catch the comments.

Consequence: if you integrate coComment into your blog, coComment will have the correct data (blog and post names, etc.) and will know to capture the comments made on it, be they by coComment users or other people.

If you don’t integrate coComment into your blog, then we still try and catch the comments (if a coComment user requests it by posting in the thread or simply choosing to track it) with the coCo-crawler. This is, however, a less precise way of capturing comments for the moment.

technorati tags:cocomment, integration, explanation

WordPress users, this is for you! Two useful plugins for coComment have been updated:

• coComment Enhancer by David has gone up to version 1.2.3b, with bug fixes as well as French and German translations.
  This plugin will integrate coComment into your blog. This means that it will ensure that coComment gets accurate data (post name, blog name, post url, etc.) independantly of the way you set up your template.
  
  It is definitely the easiest way to make your blog friendly for coComment if you’re using Wordpress, and it ensures that coComment gets the right data even if you change your template.
• Show coComments by Pablo has now been bumped up to 0.2 stable release after some bugfixes.
  This sidebar widget allows you to easily display your comments or conversations on your WordPress blog. It also works as a normal plugin if you don’t have a widget-enabled theme.

Thanks a bunch to David and Pablo for taking our feedback into account and updating their plugins. If you don’t use WordPress, all is not lost: check out our Integration page for instructions about integrating coComment into your blog (the little imps tell me it might very well be updated soon, so keep an eye on it). To display your latest comments on your blog, use a blog box which you can customize to your liking.

technorati tags:wordpress, plugin, integration, display, cocomment, comments, showcocomments, cocommentenhancer, blog

The popular German-speaking blog platform twoday.net has improved support for coComment. The default skins now contain <% this.coComment %>, which injects the following code in the comment page:

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
// adds support for CoComment
  var blogTool              = "twoday.net";
  var blogURL               = "http://newcoco.twoday.net/";
  var blogTitle             = "newcoco";
  var postURL               = "http://newcoco.twoday.net/stories/2342992/";
  var postTitle             = "Another test story";
  var commentTextFieldName  = "content_text";
  var commentButtonName     = "save";
  var commentAuthorLoggedIn = true;
  var commentAuthor = "newcoco";
  var commentFormID         = "comment-form";
// ] ]></script>

(Example taken from our test blog over there.)

This code makes sure that coComment gets the correct information when capturing a comment.

If you are a twoday user and your template was customized, you can use the diff link to see where to insert the code.

Layout > Skins (HTML) > Change templates (HTML) > Comment editor (Comment.edit)

If you want all the comments on your blog to be captured (not just those of people using the bookmarklet or the Firefox/Flock extension), you need to add the following code in your template (just before or after):

<script id="cocomment-fetchlet" src="http://www.cocomment.com/js/
enabler.js"></script>

technorati tags:twoday, integration, cocomment, template, skin, code, integrate, knallgrau, blogplatform

Chorus Line loves our cute buttons, which reminds me that we forgot to tell you about what you can do to promote coComment on your site! There are two things actually, namely:

• Putting cool buttons on your blog, like:

  

  If you have made some custom buttons or have ideas don’t hesitate to contact our head designer Raphael (raph ||at|| cocomment)

• Integrating coComment in your blog or website. All you need to do it to put a small piece of script in your template, then you and your visitors will enjoy first class coComment service!

All these actions are detailed on our Promote page. And we have some more features in the pipe but that’s a secret for now.

As you know we released a feature that allows you to catch ANY comment made on your blog regardless of the commenter being a coComment user or not. Added comfort for you and your readers with a simple javascript code,
life should always be that easy!

How can you do that? Chris posted a full explanation in the forum that I am reprinting here:

The following is just a quick draft updating the instructions for embedding coComment into your blogs. With this new approach, you will be able to track *all* the comments posted, not just the ones by fellow coComment users.

This first section you can skip, if coComment already extracts the correct information automatically. You only need it if the automatic extraction on your blog does not work or does not work reliably. This step is already documented in more detail at http://cocomment.com/integrate

<script type=”text/javascript”>
    var blogTool = “MyBlogManufacturer”;
    var blogURL = “http://www.domain.com/~myblog”;
    var blogTitle = “My Blog”;
    var postURL = “http://www.domain.com/~myblog/?p=42″;
    var postTitle = “This is Roger’s “great” post”;
    var commentTextFieldName = “messageTextArea”;
    var commentButtonName = “SubmitButton”;
    var commentAuthorLoggedIn = true;
    var commentAuthor = “Douglas Adams”;
    var commentFormName = “commentForm”;
</script>

In the following second section you’ll see the two additional attributes that you will need to include in the script tag if you want to track all comments:

<script id=”cocomment-fetchlet”
    trackAllComments=”true”
    src=”http://www.cocomment.com/js/enabler.js”>
</script>

Note that in this example I linked to the new enabler.js file instead of the cocomment.js file. Pointing directly to the cocomment.js file should work as well, but I hope loading the enabler.js file first will provide a performance benefit. If you try this new track-all-comments feature with both possible configuration options, pointing to the enabler.js and to the cocomment.js then please let us know whether you notice a performance difference.

I tried it on my blog and it works pretty well. Cool stuff, thanks Chris!