Conversation Management with coComment
Posted on March 8th, 2006
coComment is a service that sounds like it could be really handy for people who post comments to lots of different websites. It provides carbon copies of everything you write. The comment still goes where you intend it to go, but the copy gets sent to your coComment and you can view the whole menagerie from one page.
Without something like coComment, your theoretically useful contributions are scattered around. If you're crafty, you can try to persuade Google to give you a list of them but it's a crap shoot whether you'll get all or only some.
This reminds me of the discussions I saw a long time ago about how the blogging comment model ought to be inverted-- that your comments should live on your blog rather than the blog you're commenting on. In the latter case, you need to take it on faith that your contributions won't be censored or lost. Their aggregate findability, to use Peter Morville's term, is moot. You pretty much can't. Maybe this is what got the idea for Trackback rolling.
Its too bad that conversations on blogs are separate from the original forum for Internet-based dialogue: newsgroups. There have been plenty of times that I've been looking for information and had to bounce around between Google web searches and groups searches to make sure I was getting full coverage of everything that was out there. A comment on a blog and a post on a newsgroup are awfully similar, yet for technical reasons they're worlds apart.
Google lets you create new groups, however. It's not as if the newsgroup hierarchy is set in stone. You could set up a newsgroup for your blog or website, then use a commenting system that automatically forwarded newly posted comments to the newsgroup's address. Subject to moderation (or not), the comments would then be archived in a relatively safe place independent of your blog. You'd still display the comments at the bottom of each blog post, just fetch them from a different place.
It's got to be better than reinventing the conversation wheel again.