Sue Waters

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Can You Sell Me The Benefits of coComment?

My most important tip for keeping up with conversation on blogs is being very effective at managing my comments on other people’s blogs and I showed how I achieve this using Co.mment in my last post. But as Joaquin pointed out in the comments of this post another alternative is to use coComment. Last week…

Sue Waters
2 minutes
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My most important tip for keeping up with conversation on blogs is being very effective at managing my comments on other people’s blogs and I showed how I achieve this using Co.mment in my last post. But as Joaquin pointed out in the comments of this post another alternative is to use coComment.

Last week I road tested coComment to compare it’s benefits with co.mment because Alan Levine post on his annual blog absence to comment highlighted that he uses Cocomment. Perhaps I was missing something?

Trouble is I’m not sure? Ultimately what I want is a simple an effective mechanism to manage comments. Co.mment provides me with this solution. coComment definitely has more functionality and it focuses more on the community aspect.

SO I have decided that I need the community (i.e. those that use coComment) to sell me on the benefits of using coComment because perhaps the issue is how I’m using it. So my plan is to show how I use the application and hopefully this will help others highlight aspects that I’m missing.

Comment Feed Viewed In Google Reader

I like to manage comments that I track by adding the RSS feed to my Google Reader account.

When a new comment is added to a post I’m tracking using co.mment it shows an extract of the post, the name of the commenter, date, number of comments on post and the comment.

My feed from cocomment provides considerably less information. No extract from the original post, no indication of the number of comments on the post and the name of the commenter is only displayed if that person has an account with cocomment.

If the commenter doesn’t have an account the comment says Unknown says……. To make matters worse at the moment all comments with Unknown says are being feed through without the comments!!!!

The feed from co.mment provides me enough information to remind me why I am tracking the conversation so that I can make an informed decision to respond back to the comment without having to go to comment or visit the original blog. This is not the case for the feed from cocomment.

Comparing number of comments

FINAL THOUGHTS

So where am I going wrong with coComment? What am I missing? How do I make the community aspect work for me?

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18 responses to “Can You Sell Me The Benefits of coComment?”

  1. Can You Sell Me The Benefits of coComment?

    […] Al Gunn wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt […]

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  2. Gearfire.com » Blog Archive » Can You Sell Me The Benefits of coComment?

    […] Al Gunn wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptMy most important tip for keeping up with conversation on blogs is being very effective at managing my comments on other people’s blogs and I showed how I achieve this using Co.mment in my last post. But as Joaquin pointed out in the … […]

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  3. Alan Levine Avatar
    Alan Levine

    (putting on his used-car salesman plaid sportscoat… do you have cheesy car salespeople in Perth?) “Have I got a comment deal for you! A low mileage beauty…

    Actually I am not going to try and sell you. I don’t try to promote a notion that one web tool is absolutely “better” among a moving pack of others. To me it sets up a false notion that people can think they can choose one and stop looking at others.

    So I try things, and like you do so well, actually much better than me, is to share your experiences. But I am not going to tell anyone that CoComment is absolutely better then co.mment or comma-mint or com.memt.ic.ous (I made those up).

    With all that pre-amble, this is one of the lazy cases where I use the first one I tried. I’d say what works for me about CoComment is that it is automatic, it will track any blog comment I make as it is added on to my Firefox browser and attaches itself to comment fields. From what I read in your post, Co.mment requires that you remember to click a bookmark tool to register it in your stream, which I know is not much, but I know I would forget a lot.

    Other than this yearly trek of not blogging a week, I never use the CoComment site or its community tools, and in fact, looking at the RSS features of Co.mment, i think you may have sold me 😉

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  4. Christophe Avatar
    Christophe

    Actually when the comment is not entered by a coComment registered user, we try to get the author from the blog. When we fail to do so, we set it as Anonymous.
    Normally, we should be able to extract this information. If you find some blogs where it does not work, then please feel free to notify us and we will fix it.

    Regarding the RSS feed, your comment is very interesting. I will check what we can do to provide more information in our feeds.

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  5. joaquin Avatar
    joaquin

    Hi,
    Here are my two cents on why I use cocomment.
    a)it provides a plug-in (extension) for Firefox which catches the cases when you add a comment, so it automatically starts to track that conversation where you added comments (there is also options to add comment without tracking, or to track without adding comments and to add tags to the conversation). On another side co.mments doesn’t provide that. It gives you just a bookmark (which you drag to your bookmarks, or to your bookmarks toolbar), so you need to click to say ‘I want to track comments to this conversation’ (BTW coComment also gives such option)
    b)there are some advanced social features in coComment, such that you can make your comments public, people can follow where you comment, you can follow other people, and so on…
    So overall it is serving my needs, I am happy, and when I encountered some issues they were quick to respond back to me.
    Thanks, hopes it helps.

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  6. Christophe Avatar
    Christophe

    I was looking at the difference between the conversation RSS feeds from co.mment and us and I think I need your advice on something:
    We present each individual comments as a single RSS item. Which mean that all information for each comment is structured.
    co.mment create an item per conversation: the individual comments are not structured and presented as HTML, making it more difficult, I think, to identify in an RSS reader (I’m using Thunderbird) what was changed in the conversation since the last time I read the feed.
    But maybe I’m wrong as I might not use RSS feeds the proper way actually.

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  7. Darren Draper Avatar
    Darren Draper

    Interesting post, Sue, and a great extension of a discussion we’ve had on prior occasions.

    Like CogDog, I’m guilty of using the first comment tracker I ever tried. That said, however, I don’t use it for every comment I ever make – quite the contrary. I only track comment conversations that I want to appear on my blog. CoComment makes it easy to post your comments with a nice little widget (see: http://www.cocomment.com/tools/share).

    Now, in viewing comment comparisons, I think you would be remiss if you failed to mention great comment writers like Dean Shareski (539 comments), Kim Cofino (602 comments), and many others who are naturally members of a commenting league in which I can only dream of one day competing.

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  8. Dean Shareski Avatar
    Dean Shareski

    I’d probably echo Alan’s sentiments almost to the the tee. The RSS function is nice but it often doesn’t display the comment in my reader properly so I end up going back to the conversation on the blog itself. It is great when I want to go back and revisit conversations. I haven’t subscribed to other’s comments simply because I’m not sure I want to move from comments to posts to gain context. I actually turned off the FireFox script because it kept causing script errors. I do use the bookmarklet however. I also use the tagging feature albeit only to tag comments I make to my students.

    My 2cents. There I hit the

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  9. Sue Waters Avatar
    Sue Waters

    Yes Alan we do have used car salesman in Perth who are exactly like that :). You are so right we should always be questioning the tools we use and be willing to try others. What works well for me – may suit my style – may not be so great for another. For me, clicking on the bookmarklet it now just habit – happy to do this because it makes my task of managing conversations easy. If the feed from cocomment was better for my Google Reader account than I would be more than happy to change.

    Thanks Christophe for being willing to examine features that I’m looking for to manage my conversations. For me it has to be simple and provide sufficient information. Full credit to cocomment for listening to feedback. I’ve sent you an email to clarify the feeds.

    Joaquin – I would totally change to cocomment if the feed was improved for Google Reader. I’m very impressed responsiveness to their community. It’s good to hear that cocomment meets your needs.

    I have also thought a lot about our conversation Darren — you only track conversations you want to appear on your blog but how many people really read those comments? Co.mment has widget too 🙂 Thanks for suggesting I talk to others – which I did.

    Thanks Dean for informing me how you use cocomment. Interesting that you have commenting on issues with the Firefox addon. Looking forward to trialling cocomment again if they manage to make adjustments to the feed.

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  10. I’ve Gone Widget Crazy And Need Help To Control Widget Addiction | Mobile Technology in TAFE

    […] I can compromise (although maybe my hubby wouldn’t agree ).  I still prefer subscribing to comments on other bloggers posts using co.mment because its RSS feed into Google Reader is better.  However I’m intrigued by the community […]

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  11. Langwitches » Screen Capturing Tools

    […] I had not played with it, until Sue Waters used some pretty nice screen shots in her post "Can you smell the benefits of CoComment? " I asked what tool she was using and that brought me back to checking out Snag It. I like […]

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  12. ariah fine Avatar
    ariah fine

    So, now that co.mment is gone, what are you using? All I ever wanted was something that automatically sent me an rss or an email when comments came after mine on any blog.
    Can’t seem to find it. And, coComment seems to be overkill to me.

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    1. Sue Waters Avatar
      Sue Waters

      @Ariah since co.mment is gone I’m still crying. It was the best.

      Nowadays I use subscribe to notification by email of new comments and cocomment — but nothing compares to co.mment 😦

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      1. christophe Avatar
        christophe

        Hi Sue,

        Sorry that we never managed to satisfied your needs 😦
        We tried…..

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  13. Sue Waters Avatar
    Sue Waters

    Thanks Christophe, you definitely did and I do appreciate it. I still use Cocomment.

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  14. shane jast Avatar
    shane jast

    hello friends

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  15. Electronic Cigarettes Avatar
    Electronic Cigarettes

    this is a nice concept of managing comments, i think this idea will help a lot to deal with comments

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  16. cheap cars Avatar
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    Looking for cheap wheels? Here they are the least-expensive 2011 cars on sale in America. (All prices are MSRP (sticker price) plus destination charge.) The About.com Cars test team has driven all of these cheap cars, and this list will tell you which are the real deals and which are the real duds.

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