How to keep tracks with all your comments accross the blogosphere?
If you are a busy blogger, or a busy reader of bloggers, you must be exhausted with openning different websites, searching the articles you commented, and checking if the conservation still going on. But now, with coComment’s support, it is not an annoying problem to track all your’s comments accross the blogosphere. As described by the team, there are 3 funtions worth a mention.
1. Capture:coComment supplies you facilities to manage all your comments that you let “coComment” keep track with in one place, and the work could be simply done by just clicking a button on Links column just before you press submit button. Next time you login to coComment, all the comments of those articles you participated in are supposed to be gathered together on a special page as “your conversations”, and “that allows you to quickly see your comment and where it was posted, with a link to the original site“.
2. Share:According to their official website, coComment also allow you to publish your comments accross the blogosphere on your own blog. Your visitors will be able to see where you have been commenting recently and learn the value you have added to those conservation.
However, on one point I am doubting, why or will visitors be really interested in where you have recently being commenting? I mean except you are a very famous man or you made so great success in certain area, people want to know every conversation you have participated in because their curiosity, otherwise, they are usualy navigated from some other place and will left your blog just after reading certain articles. So from this point of view, it does not make that much sense to publish “your conversation” on your blog, again, if your blog is not that hot/popular! But there’s also an idea, if a blog is a topic oriented, you can make a topic oriented conservation on puspose, and publish them on your blog, by doing this way, i believe there is bigger chance the added-value will finally come true.
3. Alert:Since this tool is still in development status up to now, I can just get some idea from the introduction on coComment’s home page. The main idea is pretty much like a notifation tool to let user know what’s been added to a “particular discussion in real time“.
The work the coComment group have done by now is impressive, the service is doing great and the work to convince people is also being done quite well. So, let’s wait and see if it can be another “must have” for bloggers!
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another idea: will it be a good idea to let users define tags for their conversations? It can ease the search in future and also enrich the “share” function: visitors can choose a tag and only the conversation related with the tag would be displayed to them.
on February 11, 2006 on 4:21 pm
hi tony,
I agree that tagging your posts could be a nice feature for coComment, but im not sure how much that will improve searches cause sometimes a topic you think is technology might be fitting much more and better say under culture for example..etc. I’m sure this are facts that a good search engine is able to solve but i just wanted to double check this idea. What do you think?
/bk
on February 12, 2006 on 4:44 pm
Hi botanik,
You made a good point about limitations of tag usage. However, i think the limitation you metioned is what is happening to every web application right now, not only for coComment. Lack of tag definition makes information lost, multiple definitions may lead to redundancy. Obviously, a suggestion would be: make sure you tag definiton just match.
As for the difference between search engine and tag navigation, from my point of view, the first one can be considered as full user-oriented. Suppliers of information don’t particate in the information retrieval activity; Defining search terms, constructing search clause, filtrating and choosing results, all of these activities are usually done alone by searchers. As for the latter one, information suppliers initialize the first step of search acitivity (or to certain degree, browse activity). Pre-defined tags are given to navigate at the very beginning. And generally speaking, because of suppliers’ more accurate cognition for the information, tags always consistent with contents.
The difference result in a point, search engine works well based on huge amount of information source, for example, if use Tag navigation for huge amount of information, the same thing is usually defined by many different tags by different suppliers; Tag navigation works more efficient when information amount is relatively limit.
In coComment context, conversations of a single user usually are not of huge amount. So I think tag navigation would work better in this context; otherwise, definition of search terms for search engine is going to be a problem for searchers; some conversation can be lost if the search terms are not defined properly. For example, if a coComment users conversation include contents of “Nano”, however, there is never “iPod” show up in the conservations, what if a searcher defines a search term “iPod”? He/she will never know the record of “Nano” conservation. On the other hand, if tags are supplied, no matter “iPod” or “Nano”, readers can easily get the idea.
So, in my opionion, if there is such facility added to coComment, Tag navigation should take priority, search engine can work as assistant function.
What do you think ?
on May 12, 2007 on 3:49 pm
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