First Take: Cocomment Takes Comments Out Of The Dark

Two of my buds at the Web 2.0 Workgroup, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, beat me to the punch on Cocomment. Robert is enthusiastic while Michael is more lukewarm.

The idea is to collect all the comments that you leave on other blogs, so that you can keep track of them (there might be pearls of wisdom in there), and perhaps so that you can display them on your blog or website. I got access to the closed beta, and signed up. Check out the shiny new widget in the right margin!

The system is not foolproof. The first comment I captured, using the bookmarklet provided, wound up with no title, for example, and there seems to be no way to edit the cocomments once captured.

Here's what the service shows after my first comment:

Here's the user experience when making a comment (in this case, at Micropersuasion):

But it appears to do what it says it will, and it doesn't force you to use a different interface for entering the comments, as Michael Arrington seems to state. [Update: Michael has posted a new piece, following his actual use of the product, and clarifies this.] You enter the comments in the normal fashion, using the native commenting interface, and then, prior to hitting the submit button, you click on the cocomment bookmarklet. That javascript runs, collecting the information needed from the page, and then, depending on the blogging solution involved, it either submits the comment on your behalf, or lets you press the button. I have seen both behaviors. Pretty cool.

I hope that the cocomment cocreators will provide more control on the display options in the widget, but its workable as is.

And this is potentially an improvement over using del.icio.us to keep tabs on the dark comments that we sprinkle all over the blogosphere, and then lose track of. I hope they develop a tool to go find all the unclaimed comments I have out there, moldering in various forgotten corners.

[Update: I forgot to mention the permalink that is assigned to every cocomment. Does this mean that we might start linking into the cocomment space, instead of to the original posts? I don't think so.

Also note the social dimension of the tool: you can access a tag cloud of the most active users, and when you click on 'Stowe Boyd' that brings you to the list of my cocomments.

They provide a similar tag cloud of the most cocommented blogs.]

tags: cocomment, michael+arrington, robert+scoble, del.icio.us, social+media, blogging, blog+comments, dark+comments

Comments

[Stephanie Booth]

I'd like to second that idea of yours. A kind of utility to try to dig out all my past comments and import them into coComment would be great (if that is indeed what you had in mind).

[Mathew Ingram]

I'm with you, Stowe -- I've only just started trying it out, but so far I think it's pretty great, and something I've been wanting for some time now. I was using the del.icio.us method too, but it was just too cumbersome.

[George Appiah]

I just go an invitation ... and I'm going to give it a try.

[Zoli Erdos]

CoCo just failed to grab a comment I left at blogcritics.org. I guess that's because they are pre-beta, and support a limited number of blog platforms.
Still a very useful service though :)

Hmm.. I may just have caught an error here. After the little CoCo icon appeared next to the Post button, my firts post attempt failed, saying your blog does not alow HTML. Fine, let's re-CoCo again, then hit Post. CoCo now tells it can't finde the URL. This could not be a platform issue, you are on Typepad. (I'll copy this, then quit and come back again to see if it works).

[Russell Limprecht]

Stowe,
I too was lucky enough to get an invite. Solution Watch has a great script to make the posting process seamless.

http://russell.supersized.org/archives/258-Scoble-delivers-coComment-invites-from-Switzerland..html

[Stowe Boyd]

Zoli -

I will turn on HTML in comments. Let's see if that works.

[Ben Metcalfe]

I'm concerned that it semantically forks conversation.

Also it only represents other comments made by CoComment users.

It's a nice idea though, and proves that long term, something needs to be done in this area to agregate comments into something manageable.

[Geoff]

CoComment seems to be working fine to me. Its a really excellent idea and they seem a really switched on crowd, handing out invitations really quickly once Scoble blogged it.

[Jack Yan]

Thank you for introducing this to me, Stowe. I have it installed now, thanks to Hugh MacLeod’s introduction. After two no-gos, posting here may be third time lucky for my coComment.