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

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

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

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

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

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

Specially for you today, something that will make tagging comments really useful: feeds by user and tag. Let’s look at an example together to see how it works.

First, a reminder: you already know you can subscribe to a user’s comments or the conversations that user has participated in. For that, you use the RSS feed links that are displayed on every user’s page. For example, mine look like this:

• conversations: http://cocomment.com/rss2/steph.rss
• comments: http://cocomment.com/myrss2/steph.rss

You can also subscribe to comments identified by a given tag. This has been around for a while, but for some reason the link to the feed wasn’t visible on the page. It is now. Thus, to subscribe to comments tagged “coComment” you would use the following feed:

• comments tagged “coComment”: http://cocomment.com/rss2Tag/cocomment.rss

OK so far? Ready for the juicy part? How about subscribing to all the comments one user makes on a particular topic, identified by a tag? For example, maybe you don’t care much about the comments I usually make, but you want to keep an eye on the comments I tag “coComment”. If you’re on somebody’s conversations page (or yours!) and you click on a tag there, you’ll see an extra feed (labeled “Tag”) in the user feeds. For example:

• Steph’s comments tagged “coComment”: http://cocomment.com/rss2Tag/cocomment/steph.rss

Pretty neat! But we didn’t stop there. We’ve added a little extra special something for when you want to subscribe to your own tags. You see, subscribing to my own comments tagged “superimportant” isn’t going to be very useful. It would be much more interesting if you could subscribe to the conversations in which you once used a given tag, wouldn’t it?

Well, you can do just that. If you go to your own user page, click on a tag, and subscribe to the “Tag” user feed you find there, you’ll see that it actually subscribes you to the conversations in which you used that tag.

This opens up all sorts of exciting doors about using tags (and creating tags!) to track certain conversations and not others. I have that problem all the time: I leave comments all over the place, but I’m not as interested in tracking certain conversations as I am others. For me, it’s really important to track my conversations tagged “coComment” seriously, so I’ll subscribe to this feed and check it regularly:

• Steph’s conversations tagged “coComment”: http://cocomment.com/rss2/cocomment/steph.rss (to be precise: conversations in which I posted a comment tagged “coComment”)

I could also use another tag called “important” or “priority” to label conversations I want to track more actively than the usual chatter that I just check once in a while on my conversations page. (I’m not doing it yet, but writing all this is making me realise this is the solution to my conversation overload problems!)

What about you? How do you like the new tag/user feeds? Are you using tags to help you track your conversations better? Share your experiences with your fellow coCommenters in the comments.

Happy tagging!

technorati tags:feeds, tagging, cocomment, users, tags, explanation, features, links

Update 11pm: it seems I’ve been a bit over-enthusiastic posting this, and things aren’t yet working as smoothly as they should. I’ll let you know when everything is OK. My excuses!

We have great news for Sally and all of you who comment on HaloScan-powered blogs, or own one: coComment is now HaloScan-compatible!

Even if we don’t capture everything directly, the coCo-crawler comes along after a while and catches everything. Pretty neat, huh?

So, go on and comment happily on all those HaloScan blogs. Let us know if you run into problems, but don’t forget to give the coCo-crawler enough time to come along before thinking we’ve forgotten you!

Many thanks to Jeevan for his help and assistance in getting this to work.

technorati tags:haloscan, support, coComment, jeevan, crawling, coCo-crawler