coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

· 9 Comments

I was actu­al­ly think­ing of some­thing like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambi­tious. Any­ways, plain and sim­ple,

coCom­ment is the only ser­vice that allows you to enjoy the full poten­tial of blog com­ments on the web. Before coCom­ment, the blo­gos­phere was not a glob­al con­ver­sa­tion, but tons of frag­ment­ed, hard to fol­low, and untrack­able dis­cus­sions.

Using coCom­ment, you can now keep track of what you have been com­ment­ing on, dis­play your com­ments on your blog, and see what is new in the dis­cus­sions you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in (if oth­er users are also on coCom­ment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track com­ments from blog posts that they have actu­al­ly com­ment­ed on, and only com­ments left by oth­er cocom­ment users are shown.“1 But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new ver­sion out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yes­ter­day about ver­sion 0.4c being released, the team also men­tioned the fact that there is now a Fire­fox exten­sion for coCom­ments. This addi­tion, for sure, will make things a bit eas­i­er than hav­ing to use a book­mar­let on the user’s com­put­er.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was tak­ing a look at coCom­men­t’s Blog Inte­gra­tion sec­tion which lists which browsers and blog/CM­S/site-plat­forms it sup­port­ed, I read that Mov­able Type blogs must have the fol­low­ing for­mat,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Oth­er­wise, the com­ment (in coCom­ment) will show up as “(unti­tled)”.

So, see­ing that, there might be an issue of hav­ing every­one involved have a stan­dard way of tem­plat­ing their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and has­n’t been addressed in it’s next iter­a­tion, coCom­ment is pret­ty much forc­ing every­one to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Micro­for­mats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coCom­ment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t got­ten to play around with coCom­ment that com­plete­ly yet.)

All in all, the ser­vice is prac­ti­cal and very use­ful for those that like to read and inter­act with dif­fer­ent blogs. It’s great for coCom­ment to have got­ten around and imple­ment­ed some­thing use­ful to the mil­lions that are very involved with interblog-inter­ac­tiv­i­ty. In it’s cur­rent state of ver­sion 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the oth­er fea­tures it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pret­ty much, like all the oth­er “Web 2.0” appli­ca­tion-sites. =)


Update
My fol­low-up on coCom­ment

  1. Michael Arring­ton, coCom­ment vis­it to Sil­i­con Val­ley [↩]

9 Comments

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  1. sherwin

    Hel­lo. I’m test­ing this cocom­ment fea­ture out. I added some JS calls as not­ed on cocom­men­t’s inte­gra­tion sec­tion. Let’s see if it works… (sub­mit­ting com­ment)

  2. sherwin

    Test­ing again. This time, I have fixed the JS-inte­gra­tion. Let’s see… (sub­mit­ting)

  3. sherwin

    No luck just yet. I’ll try the TITLE-tag next. Maybe lat­er on today–its get­ting “ear­ly”…

  5. Steph

    Hi there, and thanks for your nice post about coCom­ment! The for­mat thing is, as far as I can see, going to be a nev­erend­ing issue, as coCo can only parse what it under­stands, and that relies on a cer­tain for­mat­ting.

    I also think that going through Micro­for­mats will great­ly ben­e­fit coCo — this is what I’m push­ing for and as far as I can tell, a con­cern that is shared by the team.

    For some rea­son my exten­sion isn’t work­ing cor­rect­ly here. I’ll need to check out why.

  6. sherwin

    @Easton: I total­ly agree with you on the fix­es as well as their new FF exten­sion. It total­ly is more effi­cient than their pre­vi­ous book­marklet and GM-script.

    @Steph: NP. Thanks for your efforts in try­ing to push coCom­ment to the rest of the blo­gos­phere. It not only bring val­ue to coCom­ment but to every­one in the world of blogs. One sug­ges­tion, if you may for­ward it to the rest of the team, would be to have the abil­i­ty for the Blog’s owner/author to cus­tomize the way they for­mat their TITLE-tags. With all the dif­fer­ent SEO arti­cles float­ing on the web, I have read that its usu­al­ly good prac­tice to use

    <title>Article Title — Blog Name</title>

    Now, if I can only make this inte­gra­tion work on my blog dang it =)

  7. sherwin

    Okay. I have for­mat­ted the TITLE-tag in the Indi­vid­ual Archives Tem­plate, and have re-saved this entry to be rebuilt again. Let’s see here… (sub­mit­ting)

  9. sherwin

    Okay. I think I fig­ured out what might be caus­ing the FF exten­sion to not work. I’ll update the entry with my find­ings on that and oth­er things I’d love to see coCom­ment do… (sub­mit­ting)