Many of us have gotten into a flame war in the comment section of someone's blog. Hopefully most of us have also experienced interesting and useful discussions in that context, as well. Either way, if you want to see what's been said after you left, you have to go back to the site and catch up to stay in the loop. That can be difficult if the blog is popular. CoComment has a solution.
The service allows you to stay on top of all of the comments you place on any blog, anywhere, subscribe to comment threads so you can read them later, and even provides tools you can use on your own blog to help people stay on top of the conversations they start on your site.
Update (already!): Today (November 27) CoComment announced 2 new ways to have (even more) fun on Facebook. According to the release: "The first application allows coComment users to display all the conversations they are participating in on blogs and sites, on their Facebook profiles. The second application allows blog or site owners to share the latest comments posted on their blogs or sites directly on their Facebook profiles, gaining exposure to the Facebook community."
I'm not always a fan of blog comments. Sometimes they come with more snark than intelligence. At the same time, some blogs that I read actually have interesting and thoughtful readers, and the comments form a kind of community that makes me want to come back and read more.I found CoComment to be most useful on those sites.
If you're using Firefox, you can install the CoComment extension, which will automatically pick up when you're about to make a comment, and add its toolbar to the comment field of any blog or Website you visit that accepts comments. When you're ready to make a comment, you can click "track this conversation" to stay on top of what comments are made. You can add tags to help you organize your online conversations, share the comments with others, or go directly to your CoComment homepage to view all of your tracked conversations and comments.
If you're using Internet Explorer or another browser, you can install the CoComment bookmarklet, which you have to activate before making a comment on any blog or site. Once you activate it though, your comment and the thread will immediately be added to your CoComment homepage.
The CoComment homepage is the nerve center for all of your online conversations. Once you start using it to keep track of the comments you make on blogs around the Web, you'll be really glad you have one place to visit to track all of the conversations and comment threads you're interested in, rather than having to visit each site individually. All of your conversations are listed, including comments you've made and conversations you've chosen to track. You can see if new comments have been added and when the thread was last updated with a single glance, and click on each one to expand it and see new comments that have been added and by whom. If you want to go back to the thread to say something, or if you're tired of tracking the conversation and want to delete it, you can do both of those from the homepage.
CoComment also allows you to meet other users and share interesting comments and threads with your friends. You can create groups and communities based around specific blogs or interests and share your finds with them. You can create a group of just your friends and use CoComment to update them whenever you find a blog post that you think they'd love.
Similarly, CoComment offers a number of tools to bloggers. You can embed CoComment plugins or scripts on your personal blog and let users sign in, manage their comments, share your posts and comment threads with their friends, and give your users tools to keep track of conversations they participate in. CoComment's blog plug-ins work with Wordpress, Movable Type, Pivot, B2Evolution, and TextPattern, to name a few. If your blogging platform isn't supported, you can get the code from CoComment to embed in your site, or download comment widgets for your blog's sidebar. If you like, you can outsource your blog's comments to CoComment entirely.
If you read your blogs via RSS and only visit the actual site to read or participate in comment discussions, or if you have a passion for flame wars and absolutely need to have the last word in every comment thread, CoComment is the tool for you. CoComment can also be useful for those of us looking to simplify our Web surfing and get straight to what we need to read. Blog owners will find CoComment a great way to add a lot of features to their sites and make their users' commenting experience much richer.
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