It seems that not many bloggers I know are taking advantage of the coComment service, which I mentioned briefly in this posting, so I thought it might be helpful to go into a little more detail about what the service has to offer.

coComment is an service which is used for tracking online conversations. If, like me, you often comment on other blogs and would like to know whether anyone has followed up on a comment or question you’ve posted, you’ll find coComment invaluable.

In order to use the service, the user needs to set up an account at coComment; the service is free of charge. For Firefox users, the easiest way to use it is by installing this extension. A bookmarklet is also available for those using other browsers.

After installing the Firefox extension, a blue coComment icon is added to the main toolbar, and another one is added to the status bar. You can see a list of the services that coComment supports here. Any time you add a comment to an article written on one of these platforms, coComment can automatically track that conversation and notify you of any comments added after yours. When someone adds a comment, a small envelope icon will appear in your status bar. Clicking on that icon will take you to a list of all your online conversations, and any with new content will be displayed in bold text.

In addition to the list of supported platforms mentioned above, you can ask coComment to track a conversation anywhere you find a comment box, for example on a web forum. An added bonus is that it’s also easy to start and monitor a conversation on a page with no text input boxes. If you land on such a page, both blue coComment icons will turn orange to let you know the page is being discussed. Clicking on one of these will take you to the conversation page.

It’s easy to add tags to comments. You can also follow your neighbours (those commenting on similar articles) and subscribe to favourite commenters so that you can easily track what they’ve written.

There’s a helpful little six-page tour here which shows you the coComment service in action. If you want to see what a real coComment page looks like, here’s mine.

The coComment developers have attempted to integrate the service with Technorati, but at the time of writing the integration doesn’t appear to be functioning properly, though I understand both services are looking into the problem.

I find coComment indispensable and use it all the time. If you do try it out, let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: blogging, cocomment, firefox, technorati

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