Tracking Comments

One of the challenges for keeping track of online conversations for me has been tracking comments across a wide variety of blogs and other sites.  Yesterday, I started to use coComment to help me out.  It is a bit too early to say if it is a great service or not, but I have great hopes that it will work out for me. 

I've decided not to publish the list of places I am commenting on my blog yet (an option offered by the service) so I can get a sense of how it is working.  I have to admit to feeling a little reluctant to do so for another reason, which is that I sometimes comment on things that are rather off topic for this blog.  I'd really prefer to keep as tightly to topic here as I can, so I am not sure if putting a list of all the places I am commenting makes sense or not.  I am afraid I will self-censor.  I do comment under my name in other places, but that is different, given the effort it takes to find it, than having them appear in near real time here.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Finally, a quick question.  I noticed that when I post a comment on a TypePad account, it is sent to the coComment server before I have to do the little "prove you're not a robot test".  I am not sure if that is also the case for moderated comments.  Does this mean that comments I post to someone's blog can appear on my coComment account, before/without them passing a spam test or being approved by the blog author?  This is an important question, because others can follow my comments as well via coComment.  (Yes, I am being lazy here vs. trying to find out, but I have some other things I need to do this morning.)

Ok, really the final thing - I posted a comment 10 minutes ago and it still isn't up on my coComment account, so this isn't real time (or near real time) by any stretch of the imagination (although I am not sure it needs to be for my own tracking purposes).  I'll keep track of that and let you know what I think after I've used it a bit longer. 

Comments

[John Cass]

Elizabeth, CoComment is a great solution, one that I think you will find will solve many of your comment issues. I've been using the system and I think its really helpful.

To answer your question about comments appearing on cocomment before a blog. That is possible. In fact, on several occasions I've had blog comments never appear on a blog. so the service has helped me track when comments don't appear, plus keep a record of them.

[Marc Snyder]

Elizabeth,

I tried CoComment a while back and didn't really like it all that much. I've now been using Commentful (http://commentful.com/) and like it a lot.

Regards.

MS