Back in July I posted a rant about "comments". Now I've come across a fine and sensible discussion of the issues by Jeremy Keith of Adactio called "Comments on community". Jeremy rehearses the simple fact that most comments are rubbish and that the bigger the audience the worse the rubbish to noise ratio (so happily Sansblogue is read by so few that I escape this rule and a high proportion of comments are really helpful!) He also notes the value of "conversation" (and even perhaps "community"?) but feels that:
The difficulty then is keeping track of these conversations. Trackback would be a good option but it relies on a certain level of techiness on the part of the responder and again, the issue of spam raises its ugly head. These days, it should be possible to replace trackback with search using third-party tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search. Expect to see that kind of functionality built in to more and more blogging tools.The trouble is, this functionality is "not yet". So he will probably never know that I have commented on his post... shame his blog has comments disabled!
¶ 6:26 AM
[to Del.icio.us]
I've found an interesting beta that might speed things along. cocomment allows you to use a bookmarklet to bring together all comment conversations onto a central webpage.
I find it strips the pages' context, but saves heaps of time in checking (and remembering) all your comment threads.
By 
Craig (mars-hill), at
March 22, 2006 3:16 AM
If you're using FireFox, there is even a coComment extension you can install in your browser that will remove the need to click on the bookmarklet.
http://cocomment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=291
It hasn't been officially released yet (we're still testing it) but you'll probably like it once it is.
Other than that, there is a greasemonkey script for FireFox which does the same thing: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3165
It does require you to install GreaseMonkey, though, and I'm not 100% sure it's been adapted to the latest version of coComment, but it's worth a try.
By Tara, at
April 15, 2006 7:54 PM
I should have said (I've been waiting to post about it, but have been sooo busy...) I've tried co.comment and it's great, best thing since comments themselves! Two little bookmarklets that sit on my toolbar. One to let me mark a thread of comments to follow and the other to check up on the latest comments. Brilliant.
Thanks Craig!
Tara, (if you happen to have marked this thread ; ) in what way is the extension better than the bokmarklets?
By Tim, at
April 21, 2006 10:52 AM
