After repeatedly crying out for a solution, I was really happy to become a beta user for coComment. Little did I know that there were actually TWO comment tracking solutions announced almost the simultaneously.
The coComment launch was a masterpiece of viral marketing: all it took was a couple of A-list bloggers (Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Richard MacManus, Stowe Boyd, and others) and a wildfire started. Of course it did not hurt that coComment addressed a real burning need. Or was it the 109–yr-old Cognac the Raclette and the jacuzzi? 
More on the launch by Don Dodge.
The other announcement, that of myComments, although it happened a few days earlier, went almost unnoticed. No wonder, Diego, the author announced it on his own not-so-widely read blog. A lesson to learn in marketing.
I have not had a chance to try myComments, so my initial comparison is based on what I read on his site, and some email information from Diego.
Both products essentially do the same: if I leave a comment on someone’s blog, I can receive an RSS feed of all subsequent comments – the full conversation. They have a fundamentally different approach getting there though:
CoComment requires a bookmarklet or a FireFox extension, and I have to click once to activate coCo before posting my message.
MyComments on the other hand requires a plug-in to be installed in the blog where I go to comment. If the plug-in is present, I don’t have to click anymore. At first glance this appears to be more convenient, since no extra step is required before posting the comment. There is a problem, however – this is a great concept once it is widely used, but how do we get to that scale? I want the results, but I can’t do anything about it, I am dependent on the host blog having the plug-in. We’ll have to see if this solution can take off – until then, it’s coCo-time.
Related posts:
- 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
- Comment Tracking with coComment
Update (2/6): Here’s a comparison of the two services, and a comprehensive review of blog commenting in general.
Update 2 (2/16): Apparently there is a better solution, see here.
Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Blogosphere, Conversation, Blog Comments, Comment Tracking, Conversational Index, Tracking, coComment, myComments
the coCo guys definitively demonstrated they had the buzzier skills.
BUT, I think the key feature is not the way how our comments are caught (automatically with mycomments vs coComment button to click).
For the moment coComment is very well named in that sense it means “between commenters within the same coComment community” or what we (bloggers) need is something which will catch ALL COMMENTS no matter the following commenters did subscribe or not!
We’ve been fighting a similar battle with our calendar. Granted, we had purposefully flying under the radar for a long time because we never felt we were quite ready. And, we have a different focus: family vs. technorati crowd; so we don’t have quite the Wow! factor. However, with the influx of other applications (calendar and other-wise) being rolled out under the “beta” banner with incomplete and broken functionality, we are changing our approach and have decided that any visibility is good and we will adjust accordingly. Our application is definitely better than some that we’ve seen get publicity lately (not specifically in the calendar realm).
It’s definitely a ‘who you know’ thing that gets you in the door, regardless of how good or bad your product is. So, rather than just reading this post, I’m posting hoping to expand our network of people we know.
I created a similar meta-commenting system called GoJot last year. It was a fun project, and I spent a great deal of time meditating on this idea that co/myComment tackles.
If I were to make another run at it, I wouldn’t put such a burden on users as installing a bookmarklet and then forcing them to use it all the time. Fine for geeks, but too much for Joe User.
Instead, I would create a comment search engine that:
Reads comment RSS where provided, and
Scrapes comments from pages w/o comment RSS.
I would take this data and present it many ways to the world: by blog (shows articles), by article (shows threads), and by user (shows comments w/ links to articles and blogs). No login required.
FWIW-
Sid
Sid, why “if .. would”? Does it work? Has it been announced / used? If not, why did it die?
Zoli- Thanks for the reply! I haven’t persued the idea of a comment search engine, so I don’t know how hard it would be to put together. The RSS part should be easy, since all you’re doing is packing structured data into a database and then giving users nice views into that data.
For blogs w/o comment RSS, scraping comments from the page HTML might work. I would hope that the each popular platform uses uniform HTML markup for its comments. If not, it might take just a little guesswork.
I guess I was reporting more on what I learned with GoJot that what I’ve done with it. That bookmarklets make too big an imposition on users, and that comment RSS already meets the problem halfway.
Think the idea has legs? Googling ‘comment search engine’ doesn’t bring up any obvious competitors.
Now Using coComment
coComment is a new website which allows the tracking of comments across various different blogs. Any blog which uses Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpace, TypePad, WordPress, Xanga, Flickr, Kaywa and Mojira is supported. The system doesn’t support Movabl…
myComments? Or coCo?
Lots of people, including me, have recently blogged about coComment. It certainly addresses a genuine need, or at least, a deeply felt want, in that enables you to keep track of the comments you’ve left on various blogs.
Another comment-tracking ser…
Rereading these comments, I realize I didn’t answer your question fully. I love the ideas behind GoJot and coComment, but I wonder how they would make money. That is the main reason I disengaged from GoJot. I would be glad to see coComment prove me wrong.
After I created GoJot I actually sat down and wrote its mission statement (note to self: mission statement first, coding second). Doing this, I realized what I truly wanted to build, and started in that new direction. It didn’t have to do with commenting, so I set GoJot aside. Maybe I made a mistake?
If you would like to continue this conversation via email, here is some contact information. Thanks!
The Third and Best (?) Comment Tracking Tool
This has been quite a week for all of us unhappy about missing the other half of the Conversation: in rapid succession three comment-tracking products were announced.
First came coComment with a spontaneous (?) yet well-executed viral campaign t…