There are tons of weblogs around these days. A large chunk of them have commenting systems. If you read and comment on a number of sites regularly, you end up forgetting about most of them. There’s also no way to let your readers know what you’re reading. So, we need a way to track what we’ve posted elsewhere. Enter coComment and another way to use del.icio.us.
coComment
coComment is another one of the closed beta-du-jours, a site that aims to do it for you (and track popular conversations, vis-a-vis popular posts). You read a few of the comments (Solution Watch, Tech Crunch, Scoble) and it sounds like the second coming of sliced bread: it’s going to be “HUGGEEE!!”, everyone needs it, filling a void, it’s a simple idea that will work.
The idea isn’t really new, Kottke started doing something similar awhile ago. Flickr lets you keep track of photos you’ve commented on. coComment will just be another site I have to check on a daily basis. This isn’t a jab at coComment, so much as an attempt to outline my solution and point out an alternative that isn’t in closed beta. coComment will serve a different set of needs; doing things like aggregating the comments, offering notification and some community aspects.
All niceties aside, I will take a jab at any Web 2.0 company that uses tables for layout. Oh, and there’s something called spacer.gif? For shame.
@commented-on
I’ve been making an effort to participate more in conversations on other weblogs over the last few months, and can attest that they’re hard to keep track of. Zach told me he’d been using del.icio.us to keep track of his comments and pointed me towards two posts offering a few more details. Basically, it comes down to tagging anything you comment on with @commented-on (see mine).
Del.icio.us already has a number of ways to integrate itself into your site, os and browser. You can also tag whatever you want, although coComment seems to be doing a good job covering all the popular services. If you’re a del.icio.us user, the extension for firefox can make the posting process relatively painless.
It’s simple, works for me and keeps track of my comments.