Following blog conversations

Published by in blogs on January 6th, 2007

I discovered co.mments.com today thanks to Alex Ragone. The free web tool lets anyone track comments and dialog on posts located on different people’s blogs. This is really helpful to track conversations, since relatively few blogs now seem to provide an option to be notified via email when additional people comment on a post. Dean Shareski does this on his blog, via a WordPress plug-in I assume, but even that is not necessarily as elegant a solution as co.mments.com. I’m becoming less of an email fan, and love the choice of an RSS feed when one is available.

To use co.mments.com, after signing up for a free account you can use a browser button when you are viewing the permalink to a blog post you want to track to add it to your conversations page. It appears not all blog types are supported by co.mments.com, which is unfortunate but not unexpected. One example seems to be people who use haloscan commenting, like Miguel Guhlin. Despite this shortcoming, it appears co.mments.com does support many blog platforms and will be a useful tool to use.

I’ve added a few blog posts to my conversations and added code to my blog homepage sidebar to show the latest conversations I’m tracking. I’ll experiment using this tool in upcoming weeks as a way to track continuing blog conversations.

On this day..

5 Comments »
  • http://edu.blogs.com Ewan McIntosh

    The CoComment service (for those who don’t know, this is different from the one above) has ironed out most of the problems you mention above and offers a really stable service with the new Firefox, too. What would make you trump for co.mment over CoComment?

  • http://ideasandthoughts.org Dean Shareski

    I’ve been using CoComment as Ewan mentions and have found it only slightly helpful. I love the fact it stores my comments. But the RSS function seems wonky. I’d like to subscribe via RSS to all my comments in one place. CoComments promises this but I don’t think it works that well. Alan Levine recently wrote about this service.
    http://cogdogblog.com/2006/12/19/adios-cocomment/

    I may look at Co.comments as an alternative. I think we need to feel the same way about archiving our comments as we are about our own blog posts.

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    I hadn’t heard of or used CoComment, Ewan, so thanks for sharing that as an alternative. I’m not sure which is best, but I do think this functionality is excellent. Like Dean I think the archiving and tracking of comments we make in the blogosphere are very important. Blog dialog is certainly not as linear and clearly threaded as what you can see on some discussion boards, but the threads are there and tools which help link us into different parts of those dialogs are immensely useful.

  • http://www.learning-blog.org Alex Ragone

    Thanks for the link, Wes. I love comment tracking, co.comment or cocomment (that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen). It’s an important part of blogging, and it is nice to see what develops in conversations started through comments.

  • http://robdarrow.wordpress.com Rob Darrow

    Another useful tool to follow blog conversations I discovered is: http://www.blogpulse.com.

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