A few days ago, Bruno Giussani wrote about Blogging frustrations – and a few ideas:
there is a need for the next-level blogging platform, and for new tools in the blogging ecosystem that could help turn blogging from an instrument of mainly self-expression into an instrument of interaction and conversation.
And today at ifeedyou, I read about a new tool tool called cocomments:: coComment pour suivre tes discussions dans la blogosphère:
Quelque chose que j’attendais depuis un moment… un service pour agréger les commentaires que je fais sur les autres blogs (même si ils ne sont pas forcément pertinents :-). C’est évidemment un des aspects importants des blogs et je m’étonne qu’il n’y ait pas plus de service autour de cela…
On the cocomments site, they write:
coComment will enable you to efficiently track your comments comments and conversations with others across the blogosphere
With coComment, bloggers, blog readers – basically anyone interested in the conversation being created by blog-based comments – will be able to keep track of these comments and conversations in a simple, efficient way.
How does it work?
When you become a member of coComment, you’ll install a simple bookmarklet on your browser. Whenever you make comments on another blog, you’ll do so using this bookmarklet.
[…]
So basically, it’s a dedicated comment feed reader. I don’t know how useful that is; I usually just subscribe to comment feeds with bloglines.
And cocomment doesn’t, of course, discover discussions that happen elsewhere about the same topic or blog posting, which would be the real killer app.
But I won’t knock it till I tried it – only time will tell whether this works or not.
29 Comments
Let me know if you need invitations… I have a few left!
(this comment is also a good opportunity to test the service :-)
Thanks! Testing… 1 2 3
Matthias, first thanks for testing it and any feedback is welcome to help us improve the service for the blogosphere. Then, as you say, we cannot link different conversations on the same topic for the moment but that’s also part of our ambition. We will add tags very soon and let people “cross” link conversations if they are on the same topic. Any idea on how to do this in the most intelligent way is of course welcome. Then, we also think that with our blog box service (you can decide to automatically display you last comments on your own blog, http://www.cocomment.com/boxconfig) we can reduce the number of micro-conversations because we can now also discuss at topic with our own audience (on our own blog) without having to replicate the initial post but by participating in the initial conversation. What do you think?
Ich mache das schon seit längerem mit einem leze.de (ginge auch mit del.icio.us) Bookmarklet, womit ich jeden kommentierten blogpost mit dem Tag “commented” in meinen Bookmarks ablege, status privat natürlich. Dadurch habe ich einen RSS Feed mit all den Seiten wo ich kommentiert habe. Diesen Feed wiederum habe ich als Livebookmarklet im Firefox, womit ich stets die Ã?”bersicht über mein letztes duzend Kommentare habe. Wozu brauch ich nun coComment? Entspricht etwa dem, oder?
Ã??”hm, ich meine nicht “Livebookmarklet” sondern “Dynamisches Lesezeichen”.
@nicolasD,
thanks for visiting my humble abode :-).
Aren’t tags too ambiguous? Or is the plan to use very specific, multi-word tags?
As everybod wants to discuss a topic with his/her own audience on his/her blog, I doubt that the blog box service will have the impact of reducing the number of micro-conversations. Right now, the box just displays every comment. Which is fine, of course, but it would have to be much more targeted, e.g. only display comments pertinent to the topic of a specific entry in my blog.
I think cocomments has potential; we’ll see how the features work out in a couple months.
But these last few months I’ve realized that the best distributed conversation system is Usenet: It was built for the purpose; it has one standard protocol that is supported by all parties; it lives on a decentralized server structure where each server can chooses which newsgroups to carry; and there is a huge number of existing applications that allow you to follow discussions or ignore them as you wish.
Guess I’ll have to get myself a Usenet server account again :-)
@Sandro,
wie ich im Beitrag erwähne, mache ich etwas ähnliches mit Bloglines. cocomments scheint mir aber einen etwas anderen Ansatz zu verfolgen. Es wird sich sicher im Gebrauch zeigen, ob dieser Ansatz benutzerfreundlicher ist als das einfache Abo von Kommentar-Feeds. Denkbar wären ja durchaus noch Zusatz-Features, wie oben kurz erwähnt.
Thanks Matthias for posting this. I somehow missed it on iFeedYou (Sorry Jérôme ;-)
I believe this tool might actually be very useful! But apparently it only includes replies of people that also use coComment. If it would include every comment on postings I have commented it would be much more useful. But that’s very difficult to impossible to do. Though I have a few ideas about that.
I’m waiting how Chregu implements the commenting feature on the planet (using the new list.blogug.ch comments feed field). I have some ideas about how to use that myself.
@Matthias,
thanks for the humble welcoming :-)
What do you mean by multi-word tags? We are planning to use tags because they are commonly used in the blogosphere but explain me your idea.
Then I agree with you that the objective it not in fact to reduce the number of conversations you have with your readers. The idea is that your online activity is more than the one you have on you own blog. It might be that you participate to more conversations in the blogosphere that the number of articles you’re posting. At the same time you cannot write a post for each one of these conversations but your readers are interested in you, your activity and your opinion in general. We think coComment can complement (not replace) your posts with participations to others conversations. But what’s really important for us is to have your feedbacks and ideas in order to make as usefull as possible for you. You’re saying â€?”we’ll see how the features work out in a couple monthsâ€? and you’re right this is essential but you can also influence this features. So thanks in advance for your participation :-)
@Sandro,
I know that they are others ways to collect comments made in the blogosphere. We are trying to make it more simple and with more features. For example, for the blog box, you can choose to display only your comments for an article or also the context, meaning a few others comments from others users before and after your participation. Of course this is only possible at the moment if other people use also coComment but we are working on ways to integrate our service in the blog itself. Then, for following conversations, comments feeds are sometimes available (wordpress, kaywa and in the wishlist for many tools…) but that’s not always the case for the moment. We think it make sense to propose something that could let you do this everywhere. Of course, at the moment this is again limited to participation of coComment users but I think this can already be interesting within existing communities around a blog where the audience is often faithful. We also want to propose an intelligent notification system to be integrated in your blog also. We are working on the possibility to send you comments to an IM if you’re online or by SMS / Email if you’re not online. I say integrate because our idea is that you will be able to directly reply to the comment by IM / Email or SMS, meaning from everywhere and rapidly if this is important. I assume they can be ways to do this by now coupling others services for this purpose. But we want to simplify this and concentrate only the conversation. Again, your ideas are really welcome.
Another important point for us is the fact that blogs are not only read and commented by bloggers. They are many people that are not technical experts and do not have they own blog. What’s happening then? Non-bloggers don’t have a identity in the blogosphere even if they are a very important part of it. Non-bloggers have no personal page to link to or to store their online activity. I think that coComment can be the first step in the blogosphere for actual readers / commenters becoming then also bloggers. I personally admit I don’t have a personal blog but I participate a lot in the blogosphere, reading and commenting. I think this is important to link blogger and non-bloggers and that’s what we are also doing in coComment with Laurent Haug from (www.lift06.org, http://www.ballpark.ch/blog ) and other bloggers lilke Nicolas Nova (http://tecfa.unige.ch ). The objective is to ameliorate conditions around conversations happening in blogs, for bloggers and non-bloggers. So don’t hesitate to give your inputs. Thanks, Nicolas.
@Patrice,
I just read that “Though I have a few ideas about that.”.
Let us know, this is the place to discuss them :-)
@nicolasD: I think many tools provide a comment feed (some for the whole blog and some for individual entries). It would be awfully cool if coComment could subscribe to those feed and then attach the comments there to my “Your conversations” window. The difficulties would be:
a) finding the comment feed.
b) knowing the format of the comment feed.
c) updating. it wouldn’t be real time like the coComment bookmarklet is.
d) probably more. ;-)
And I just forgot to coComment the previous comment… Another reason why it would be important to implement something like this. :)
@nicolasD,
A tag is just one word. Something like “Politik” is not very specific; if there are a lot of comments tagged “Politik”, I might not be able to find the conversation I’m interested in. So we’d have to either use several tags, e.g. Politik, SP, Bern, Wahlen, 2006 or compound tags like “SP Wahlen 2006 Bern”.
I already made a few suggestions in the Forum; more to come as I use the tool and figure out what’s missing :-)
@Patrice,
I still owe you a reply to your e-mail about blogug.ch; I’m on it :-).
@Patrice
> I somehow missed it on iFeedYou (Sorry Jérôme ;-)
How can you ??? can not believe this :-)
@Patrice,
I get your point with the RSS for comments. I had a brief check with Jérôme from Kaywa and we saw that typepad and blogger where not using comment feeds for example. But sure, comment feeds when existing would be the most accurate info for the comment thread. coComment would have to check very regularly these feeds to see if something is new in the conversation. Howw that’s huge traffic, it would be so much easier if blogs could ping us :-) Maybe we could work out something with a client, a kind p-to-p to help us keep track of the conversation status. What do you think?
@Matthias,
Sure, with tags we mean multiple tags as I totally agree with you that single tag is really to limited.
I’m really so glad to see this is taking shape! Robert even sent a picture to Flickr of Laurent showing them how it works:
http://flickr.com/photos/35034363287@N01/95437797/
test test test… hier bin ich richtig…
@steph, Scoble has 82 comments, I have 16. If comments are an indicator of popularity, that makes me almost 1/5 as popular as Scoble. Not bad!
But I guess I’m just kidding myself :-).
@Jérôme, would you be so kind as to send me an invitation to admc (AT) freemail (DOT) hu?
Thank you…
oink oink
hechel hechel
und gleich nochmals zum tracken
Könnt ihr jetzt bitte wieder in euren eigenen Blogs spielen? Danke.
Scusa Matthias, hast ja recht aber EE geht noch nicht ;-)
rouge, du musst halt Blogs lesen: http://www.cocomment.com/teamblog/?p=21 hat eine Gebrauchsanweisung, wie man jeden Blog cocomment-fähig macht.
@matthias
Sorry Matthias, ich musste rouge schnell was erklären. Ich bin schuld!! Lass dich nicht an ihm aus!
Ruhig Blut Leute – danke euch beiden!
:-)
versteh ich das richtig?
Was verstehst du richtig? :)
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