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At last, a way to track blog comments

If you’re like me (and I know I am), you travel around the blogosphere reading different posts on blogs and adding your thoughtful comments here and there - and again, if you’re like me, you often forget what you said or where. As a result, you miss the responses to your comments, which in most cases (okay, some cases) have valuable information in them, or make a point that corrects your initial impressions. Like others, including Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion.com, I’ve been looking for an easy way to track this kind of activity.

At last, it looks as though someone has come up with it: Robert Scoble and TechCrunch are both talking about a new beta service called CoComment.com, which allows you to track your comments wherever they are made, to be notified when someone responds to your comment, and to see all your comments in one place (and publish them on your blog, if you wish to do so).

I was unable to use one of the demo codes that the CoComment guys attached in comments (how fitting) to Scoble’s post, but I’m eager to try this service out. I think it is exactly the kind of juice we need to keep the conversation going.

Update:

Someone at CoComment.com was kind enough to send me an activation code, so I am now signed up with the service, and have installed a “comment box” in my sidebar, which will track comments I’ve made, as well as responses to those comments. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of that comment stream, which I’ve done - and in the future, the site says blog publishers will be able to add code to their comment sections so that the service will index comments left there even if the commenters themselves haven’t signed up for the service.

Stowe Boyd has more here, and so does Solution Watch - including a greasemonkey script that avoids the need for a bookmarklet. Ben Metcalfe has some thoughts as well.

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Discussion

13 comments for “At last, a way to track blog comments”

  1. A few more codes in this post’s comments:

    http://www.ballpark.ch/blog/english/513/cocomment

    Posted by Pierre | February 5, 2006, 5:20 am
  2. mathew,
    we need to get on the cool list so we get invited to these betas rather than having to beg…:)

    Posted by mark evans | February 5, 2006, 9:38 am
  3. I think this is a neat idea and am also going to give it a try, which is of course what I am doing here for the first time.

    Posted by Kent Newsome | February 5, 2006, 11:03 am
  4. Thanks for dropping by, Kent. I’m happy to have my blog be the guinea pig for you :-) I did the same thing on Stowe Boyd’s blog just an hour or so ago…

    And I know what you mean, Mark — but hey, begging seems to work too :-)

    Posted by Mathew | February 5, 2006, 11:06 am
  5. The new way to launch your product or company

    In the old days you needed a big marketing staff, a huge budget, a PR agency, an elaborate press event at a big hotel (with food and drinks), and the attention of the trade press writers to launch your product. And then you would pray that all that inv…

    Posted by Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing | February 5, 2006, 2:41 pm
  6. 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 code…

    Posted by Zoli's Blog | February 5, 2006, 5:14 pm
  7. “and I know I am”??

    Milk snorted out my nose ….

    Posted by Rob Hyndman | February 5, 2006, 10:08 pm
  8. :-)

    Posted by Mathew | February 5, 2006, 10:28 pm
  9. This is exciting news indeed! Of course I didn’t get a chance to try it out, I guess I am not cool enough yet. :-) But I can’t wait to get my hands on it and give it a try.

    Just a random thought, wouldn’t it be much better if the system was actually implemented into blogs so the comment tracking could be seamless?

    Posted by Taylan Pince | February 5, 2006, 10:48 pm
  10. Taylan:

    According to the site, the CoComment guys are working on that, they
    just haven’t rolled it out yet. I think they want to make sure they
    can support all the major blogging platforms first.

    Posted by Mathew | February 5, 2006, 10:51 pm
  11. mathewingram.com

    Posted by The Taylan Pince Blog | February 6, 2006, 8:23 pm
  12. 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…

    Posted by Zoli's Blog | February 14, 2006, 11:47 am
  13. + Discussion: It’s Rishi, BrianShih.com,mathewingram.com/work, Ross Mayfield’s Weblog and Things That

    Posted by tech.memeorandum @ 1:45 AM ET, February 5, 2006 | April 18, 2006, 9:19 pm

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I'm a technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and this is where I blog about things I come across on the Web. Feel free to leave a comment or use the contact form to send me an email.

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