coComment – Prelude to Virtual Blogs? The Genie is Out of the Bottle

Despite some initial glitches (hey, it’s pre-beta ) I enjoy using coComment. It is HOT.  Scoble announced it yesterday, then it quickly got profiled on TecCrunch, and people (including yours truly) were begging for invitattion codes to the closed beta, and now it’s all over Memeorandum, Megite, Tailrank .. you name it. (See more ref’s at the bottom).

Of course it did not hurt to have  “brand names” like Scoble and TechCrunh  jumpstart it, but coComment could not have possibly spread like this had it not met a very-very basic need.  Until now, we’ve been missing half the conversation in the Blogosphere.

The missing half is comments left by bloggers (or non-bloggers) on other people’s blogs. As Stowe Boyd’s new Conversational Index sharply shows,  the real vibrant blogs have far more comments than original posts by the blog author.   From the commenters’ pint of view, assuming they are not all A-listers (they can’t be… with 26 million blogs around), well, many of them participate in the conversation mostly this way, not on their lesser-known blogs.  In fact, there are hyper-active commenters who don’t even write their own blog. 

Michael Parekh has proposed that these blogless bloggers should have their Virtual Blog:

“There are possibly several times more folks who COMMENT on blogs as those who MAINTAIN their own blogs.  These are the “Lurkers” of old (remember the good old days of message boards?) who occasionally come out and say something when they really feel strongly about.

Imagine if every person who comments had a PRE-SET user name that worked on all blogs in the system.  Then imagine is that user-name could be used, with the user’s permission of course, to construct a “virtual blog” for that user on the fly, listing their comments across various blogs, WITH the under-lying context.  Voila…we’d have millions of new bloggers overnight with their own virtual blogs, WITHOUT them having to go through the EFFORT OF MAINTAINING A REGULAR BLOG AT ALL.”

Responding to Michael I pointed out that the the foundation for the preset username he proposes largely exists, in the form of Typekey by Typepad, Reader Accounts by Blogware… and whatever other authentication schemes the major platforms use.

Today there is another proposal on coComment’s forum about creating Virtual Blogs:

“Now, that’s interesting! Think about it. Czheng is an active “commenter” participating in conversations. Now, the Next Big Thing would be for coComment to have “virtual blogs” which are automatically created from the conversations they monitor. The more control they give the commenter, the more seamless the transition would be between commenting on other people’s blogs, and having those comments begin to populate your own blog automatically. Of course, you could then “tailor and edit” the content you’ve already (via commenting) put on your virtual blog….”

coComment-ers seem to have embraced the idea.  They are probably overwhelmed with feedback / ideas for a while.  Other contribute a lot more than ideas:  Brian Benzinger not only provided  a detailed review, but overnight he created a Greasemonkey script to automate the process.

The Genie is out of the bottle … there is no stopping now.   This is a good day for bloggers.

Related post (just a sampling from the deluge):

• coComment: Comment Tracking  

• At last, a way to track blog comments

• CoComment and the Conversation Index
• CoComment: semantically forked conversation?
• Testing out coComment
• coComment – Tracking Blog Comments
• Time spent in signal
• Coco nuts, invitation code has been already used
• …

I give up, the list if far from complete, check out Megite, it’s dominated by coCo
It’s a real CoCorush

Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Blogosphere, Conversation, Blog Comments, Comment Tracking, Conversational Index, Tracking, coComment