Application Architecture for the Enterprise

co.mments To the Rescue

I complained awhile back that since beginning to read blogs one of the things I have found extremely frustrating was finding a way to watch ongoing conversations rather than just initial posts. My man Coté came to the rescue and clued me into co.mments . Note: as a measure of my appreciation, I actually took time to type the HTML entity, rather than the trailing-apostrophe, ASCII version! ;-)

This is exactly what I was looking for, and I very heavily recommend that you start using this. I had previously tried using cocomment, which worked okay, but I didn't always want to participate in conversations to watch them. co.mments lets me easily add tracking to a conversation with a bookmarklet, and I can easily just lurk rather than participate.

co.mments is completely Web 2-ish. Not only does it have a name that it easy to type but hard to say to your friends, it has a wicked cool fade-in at the top of the page to calmly reassure you that you will be notified of updates, and you don't even leave the page.

They have a great tracking page on their site (again, very Web 2-ish), but I am even more stoked about the RSS feed. I added the feed to my BlogLines, and now I get notifications of updated conversations, right next to my other subscriptions. This is serious converstation tracking, folks!

So far it has worked well with most blog platforms underlying the blogs that I read - sorry but I haven't done a complete rundown. The main drawback I have found so far is that it doesn't work with people who use HaloScan for comments - which seems to occur when people seek good medicine for the bad Blogger disease of no trackbacks, and figure why not use it for comments too. (can' wait for you to switch Anne! ;-)

Well done co.mments and thanks Cote, you are saving me time everyday!

posted by scott @ 5:56 PM