coComment – Cas’ first thoughts

Well, I finally got me an invite. I went from having no invites whatsoever at midnight last night, to having ten when I checked my mail this morning! The codes people kindly sent me, but that I didn’t use (well, there’s only one of me!) can be found at the end of this post. Please feel free to use one!

There’s not much I can say about this that hasn’t already been said. Simply put, it is a third-party way of keeping track of all the comments you make across various blogs (currently only on the big six platforms – Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpaces, TypePad, WordPress, Xanga).

I’m a great believer in ‘conversation’, as opposed to one-way broadcast communication, and consequently the release of coComment into beta over the weekend got me excited beyond all common sense.

I’ve had it set up most of the day now, and am still getting to grips with the finer points, but the following are my current thoughts (in no particular order).

I’ve managed to replicate Josh’s problem with regards the ‘more articles from this blog’ – clicking on such a link for a Bright Meadow comment takes you to TechCrunch’s blog page – blog 277. Nor, it seems, am I the only one. Lots of the articles on the TechCrunch page are not, in fact, from TechCrunch.
In the time it took me to write this post (with break to watch ‘Corpse Bride’ and go to the supermarket), the above problem seems to be fixed. If you are curious, Bright Meadow is now blog number 636.

It still seems to be unable to pick up the title of the individual posts, but according to the help forums, this is a WP issue down to the sheer customizability of the themes! (Mildly ironic). They’re working on fixing it.

I’m using the Greasemonkey script to make things run that little bit smoother – lovely, because I don’t have to remember to click the bookmarklet (I used it a grand total of two times with the bookmarklet before switching to Greasemonkey). On the whole, I have nothing against bookmarklets, but I only have so much real estate in my toolbar, and with RSI rearing it’s ugly head again today, the fewer clicks I have to make with the mouse the better!

The “adding this comment to the blog” box doesn’t always disappear once the comment is added, forcing me to refresh. I have a sneaky feeling this might be because of a clash with my comment-preview plugin, because I haven’t noticed this behaviour on blogs without this functionality. Just in case it is this plugin that is conflicting, I’ve disabled it for now. Let me know if you all really want previewing back, because coComment is currently more important to me.

Occasionally, the ‘expand’ option gets stuck, and it refuses to collapse a comment-stream. No biggy, I just hit ‘reload’.

And one last niggle – you can’t cmd+click to force “view articles from this blog” to open in a new tab. You have to right click or ctrl+click to open up the context menu and do it from there (I’m on a Mac). All the other links you can cmd+click on, just not that one.

A non-bookmarklet option for if I was commenting on a blog and I wasn’t on my own computer?

The coComments box in my sidebar isn’t picking up new comments.

At the moment, only comments made by registered coComment users show up on the coComment page, so you don’t necessarily get the full comment-picture. They are working on an “integrate” tool which will enable all comments made, regardless of who makes them, to show up on the coComment page. This would be lovely, especially considering the limited number of coComment users.

If people are interested in getting coComment for themselves, I would suggest hightailing it off to the coComment website and registering your interest by submitting your email addy in the box provided. They got back to me within a few hours.
Option two is to go to Laurent’s blog and ask him nicely. He got back to me again in a few hours.
Option three is to use one of the codes below. Now, I can’t actually remember which one of these I used, so you’ll just have to do a bit of trial and error. I don’t have the volume of traffic of Scoble et al, so I imagine these should remain good for a little while at least.
Option four is to trust in the serendipity of the Internet. Contrary to expectations, people do read and comment on other peoples blogs, even little ones like this one. You never know who is reading ๐Ÿ™‚

These ones have been lurking on another blog for most of the day, so might not still be valid:
0856-7645-1274
9256-8411-9892
6385-9313-5550
7452-6272-2669
2754-4520-5864

These ones should be ‘fresh’
6071-3953-8099
9002-6621-7835
4653-5976-0105
6239-2516-2822
4183-8444-2243-1195-9648

Thank you again Laurent and everyone who got me a code, or who pointed out where I might find a code. I’m having great fun playing with this ๐Ÿ˜€
coComment, comments, conversation

13 thoughts on “coComment – Cas’ first thoughts

  1. And it wasn’t a conflict with the preview plugin – the “adding the comment” box just doesn’t like disappearing. Is anyone else having this problem?

  2. Thanks so much for the code. There has been quite a bit of buzz about this service, so I’ve been really itching to try it out.

  3. You’re welcome Jeff ๐Ÿ™‚

    Mik, if none of the codes in the post is valid, I would really recommend you go to http://www.cocomment.com and register your email address. They seem to be managing to send out codes shortly after they are requested there.

  4. Thanks but i following you via cocomment right now ๐Ÿ™‚ I found a code…
    But any new user has a code??
    If yes i can share my here to itereseted …
    Bye and thanks

    P.S: How do you your portrait stylized???

  5. I’m glad you found a code Mik.
    With regards the code, each user (typically) gets one code to use that is unique to them. I had a surfeit of codes because I asked for one in about three separate places!

    If you, or anyone else, however, has some codes going spare, well, please do share them here ๐Ÿ™‚

    And my portrait is actually based on my Yahoo avatar, which I then tweaked a bit in photoshop.

  6. coComment is definitely a good idea to keep track of your conversation. I’m less convinced about the need of sharing and being alerted.

    But wouldnรขโ‚ฌโ„ขt be nice if we could couple a tool like coComment with a reputation system for blog comments?

    This is basically what we are trying to build with our proposal of a reputation system for blog comments.
    There are lengthy posts about it on the Clipperz blog.

    To test this proposal we are planning to:
    – design an API for the reputation managers;
    – implement a functional and free reputation manager service at clipperz.com (the site will go live shortly)
    – (trying to) implement reputation modules for a couple of leading blogging platforms (with a lot of help from their communities)

    Anyone interested?

  7. that sounds like an interesting idea Marco, i have popped open your link and I am heading over there next to have a gander at what you are proposing.

    I am assuming that you have a major portion of your work cut out for you to stop people from gaming the system?

  8. I must apologise to both John and Dewayne. For some reason, Askimet took a disliking to your comments and, as I’m not yet used to checking my Askimet queue, you got stuck. It’s only because of coComment that I realised Dewayne had posted but that it wasn’t showing!

    John, I’m glad you got a code that worked.

    Marco, I’m intrigued by your proposal, and you can be sure I will look at it in more detail ๐Ÿ™‚

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