Blogging Tips

I stumbled upon a new site today which aims to make the process of commentating on blogs quicker and easier. The site is called CoComment and after familiarising myself with it for an hour or so my initial impressions of the service are overwhelmingly positive.

In short, CoComment lets you track all of the comments you have made in one place. It essentially removes the need to request updates to a blog post as you can stay updated through them.

How to use CoComment

I think it’s easier to explain exactly what the site does if I walk you all through it

First thing you need to do is register. Thankfully this is incredibly quick to do, the short registration form is on the home page!

After you have registered you will come to this screen.

1. Get Ready : In order to use CoComment you need to either install a plugin to Firefox or add a bookmarklet to your browser. I prefer using the firefox plugin.
3. Test it now : CoComment then point you towards their test blog. This will be your first chance to test out their service. If you prefer, come back to this post after registering and test it out here

   Before publishing your comment, you will notice a CoComment bar in the comment area. It looks like this :

   

   I have installed this comment bar at Blogging Tips so you should see this in the comment area of this page.

4. View the result : When you have subscribed to a post you can then track comments through your account.

   

   You can expand each post to see all the comments which have been posted. It also tells you when the last comment was posted.

   

It should only take you 10 minutes to get used to the way it works, it’s fairly straight forward.

Integrating CoComment with your blog

CoComment is able to integrate with a variety of different blogging platforms :

• WordPress
• Text Pattern
• Serendipity
• Expression Engine
• Pivot
• b2evolution
• Movable Type
• Community Server

You will have noticed that Blogger and a few other blogging platforms are not in the above list. Don’t worry, CoComment gives you some Javascript code to use for other blogging standards.

Other features

CoComment has a few other features which I think will help increase its popularity.

The Technorati integration option lets you add all of your comments to Technorati. This is a useful way to drive traffic to your blog but I can’t help but think that if this proves popular we will see more comments than actual posts listed on Technorati.

The Sharing options are a lot more useful in my opinion. You can add your latest comments to your blog so that others can see what you have been saying around the blogosphere, you can add a top commentator list and you can also add a box showing the top keywords from your blog. Not everyone will use these but it’s a nice addition in my opinion. I’ve added my latest comments to my about page to show you how it works though I’m sure some may prefer to add it to their sidebar (I may do this in the future as well).

Summary

I think that CoComment is going to become very popular amongst blog commentators. It’s incredibly straight forward to use and it’s very useful, forgetting which posts you commentated on should be a thing of the past! I also believe that showing readers of your blog what you have been saying on other comments will prove to be one of it’s best selling points.

If you have any questions relating to the site please let me know and I’ll do my best to clarify things for you

Thank you,

Kevin Muldoon