Follow Conversations? Easy!
For a long time it was a huge pain in the neck to follow the blogs and threads I was ever commenting on. Most of the time I had to make a heart-bleeding decision whether it is going to be a fire-and-forget kind of comment or will I bookmark it somehow for the later returns. I realize everyone has similar problems, otherwise they wouldn’t ask us to add some kind of comments tracking to BlogBridge, so that I’m not alone in these sufferings.
It seems someone got to the point of being desperate, and finally decided to aid the community with an excellent comment threads tracker — cocomment.com. I discovered it by sheer accident noticing in my recent trackbacks section of the Wordpress administrative dashboard a reference from some new site. Quick check of the inbound link led to this amazing discovery. (BTW, it was you Markus, who “showed” me the way with your “IELTS: Done.” tracking.)
So how it is going to help? I believe they support some major blogging systems (Wordpress, Flickr, Blogger.com as I managed to notice from their guide) and use their comment tracking feeds and functions to get the list of recent updates. Then they process collected data and do notifications, organization and nice Web 2.0-ish display of threads in the inbox style. Nothing really complex, but they are the first (to my best knowledge) to turn it from a dream to a real thing. My kudos to you guys!
I personally, will give them a spin. It seems to be a good idea to finally organize my commenting world. It’s not too big, but still… One side-effect I noticed is that whatever conversation you take part in becomes visible to anyone in the world. I believe there’s something I can do to stay private as it’s definitely not in my plans to share a big chunk my personal life with “a community”. Let private stay private, I would say.
Anyway, good piece of news!
Update: I found privacy settings where they let (but not recommend) me hide my conversations from the world.
July 1st, 2007 at 16:21
> “BTW, it was you Markus, who “showed” me the way with your “IELTS: Done.” tracking.”
Ahemm. ???. Some hint? What did I do? Or some other Markus? Maybe it is pure paranoia…
OK, it must be a different cup of tea: IELTS - International English Language Testing System
Back to the subject: I am using CoComment since a very long time and I can recommend their plugin for Firefox which enables tagged comment tracking nearly everywhere. Disadvantage: It eats page loading performance.
You can i.e. track CoComment conversations in total or by tag via RSS. This way I am also collecting and republishing my comments in an RSS agregator database.
July 1st, 2007 at 21:15
>> “BTW, it was you Markus, who “showed” me the way with your “IELTS: Done.” tracking.”
>
> Ahemm. ???. Some hint? What did I do? Or some other Markus? Maybe it is > pure paranoia…
You just used cocomment to track the comments for my “IELTS: Done.” post tracking and then I saw a link to cocomment.com (the list of the blogs you are tracking to be precise) in my trackbacks list. That’s how I learned about it.
I use the plug-in for FF and even thinking of integrating our BB forum with it. It is pretty simple… just need to carve out some 30 minutes of time. Is it a nice-to-have or am I overrating the usefulness?
July 3rd, 2007 at 15:48
> You just used cocomment to track the comments for my “IELTS: Done.”
I see
> integrating our BB forum with it.
Well, I am following my own CoComment comments and I am also following the ‘related’ comments via the CoComments RSS via BlogBridge
That way my bad memory gets some useful ‘hints’ the next day
For me it is much more than just a ‘nice to have’ feature. Esp. the tagging is useful as you can subscribe to tags via RSS…