(If you’re one of those people who reads something and hears the authors voice as they read it, please bear with me whilst I sound incredibly croaky. I’m not just hoarse – I’m the entire bloody farmyard right now.)

Yesterday RIB got himself a special badge because he named the penguin (Mr Flibble, in case you missed the announcement).

Today I would like to welcome one more Minion to the fold – Josh. Whilst he’s a relative newcomer to Bright Meadow, he’s put in sterling works in the comments, and has forwarded on to me some very thought provoking articles, more than one of which has found its way into the weekly ‘Roast. Oh, and he’s made me smile on more than one occasion, which is always a plus.

Congratulations Josh – I would like to award you with your Minion Button, your place in the Blog Minion Hall of Fame, and this virtual cup of tea.

Now go, take your button out into the world and proudly proclaim to one and all your Minion-hood!

Endnotes:
^*1*For those new to Bright Meadow, Blog Minions are the special people who bring something back to the conversation. I adore all my readers equally, even you lurkers who never say anything – my Minions are the people who make it that little bit easier to bring you Bright Meadow 🙂 If you want to find out how to be a Blog Minion, or who is a Blog Minion already, simply go to the Blog Minion Hall of Fame.
^*2* And no, it isn’t a derogatory term. I mean it in a nice way.

Blog Minions, Josh Teeters

The polls are now closed. I hope everyone who wanted to managed to get their vote in on time.

First, the runners-up (in reverse order) are:

• Aliette, chosen by Cas, with 6.25 % of the vote
• Pablo, chosen by Moose, with 6.25 % of the vote
• Optimus Pengu, chosen by the CC, with 6.25 % of the vote
• Clio, chosen by Spooky, with 12.5 % of the vote
• Brix, chosen by Dewayne, with 12.5 % of the vote
• Satanic Penguin of Doom (3), chosen by Joseph, with 12.5 % of the vote
• Remington, chosen by JB, with 12.5 % of the vote

It brings me great pleasure to announce the winner of the Name That Penguin competition.

Drum Roll Please!

The Bright Meadow Penguin is now called…

Mr Flibble.

I’ll leave RIB to explain the full meaning behind the name (if he wants to), but for me it brings back many happy memories from the Terisia and Castle of Fun days over at WotC.

It’s a great name RIB, and it gives me great pleasure to present to you this special button:

What you do with it now, well, that’s up to you. I just felt the naming needed some recognition 🙂

Thank you everyone who voted and took part. Now will everyone please stand up, say hello to Mr Flibble, and make him feel at home.

I told myself a long time ago that I wouldn’t link to one of Robert Scoble’s articles. I have no sensible reason for this, just a mild distaste I found left in my mouth after reading some of his posts a year or so back. Nothing personal, I just… didn’t find his style to my liking. I don’t know why, but something simply rubbed me up the wrong way. You can’t like everyone in this world, I have discovered, and rather than be mean I just went elsewhere for my reading pleasure. I’ve stuck to my guns for over twelve months now and hadn’t even noticed I was missing anything until Stowe the other day pointed me at Scobleizer in my quest for CoCo codes.

I realised that, personal dislike of tone aside, I was cutting off my own nose to spite my face – here was a valuable source of information and opinion. Some people become A-Listers for a reason and, if I want to disagree with something, I should be as fully informed as possible. Know thy enemy!

Anyway, just because Vienna shows me the feeds, it doesn’t mean I have to read them, right? Subscribe I did.

Well…

This morning, he had a post about another CommentTracker (myComment) that was released around the same time as coComment, but that slipped through the net of public attention.

If ever there was a lesson in the benefit of getting the A-List on your side, coComment is IT!

Aside from genius viral marketing, now I am aware of the existence of myComment, why am I going to be sticking with coComment?

Well, from what little I can gather from the myComment site, MyCo relies on a plugin installed on the site you are commenting on. If the blog doesn’t have the plugin, then your comment will not be tracked. CoCo on the other hand simply requires the person doing the conversation to have an account.

A subtle difference, to be sure, but the main reason I was drawn to CoCo (and why I expect so many others were as well) is that it tracks all the comments I make, regardless of where they are. ^*1* MyCo on the other hand will only track comments I make on blogs that have the plugin. What of blogs such as .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com where people can’t install plugins?

Why the onus should be on the commenter, not the host, is a topic for another day. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. Perhaps it really should be up to the host-blogger to make this functionality available to us. But, at the moment, that is impractical. CoCo relies on a much lower level of market saturation to work than MyCo would. Whilst, at the moment, CoCo only tracks comments made by CoCo-registered people, it provides (semi-)automatic logging of all of the conversations you have participated in. I don’t (really) care that CoCo only shows my comments, and a few others, at the moment. I know that it will show a good 95% of the comments I have made across the Web. MyCo, on the other hand, will only supply a partial picture of the comments I make.

For MyCo to work, it needs for more or less the entire Internet to adopt it. For CoCo to work, it just needs me to remember to hit a bookmarklet (or to install a Greasemonkey script and forget about it).

Oh, and because I am dealing with something Scobleizer put me on to, I will deal with something else of his at the same time – congratulations Atariboy for your top-spot. Not that, you know, such rankings are really all that representative. High traffic doesn’t automatically equate to good content. I know blogs with a readership of five that I enjoy reading more than blogs with a readership in the thousands. Still credit where it’s due, Atariboy has some good content. So, I am forced to admit now, does Robert. And there’s no denying that a link from the Scobleizer is worth its weight in Blogosphere-Gold. Mildly ironic. Linking to the chap who knocked him off the top spot is likely to make it harder to get back up… At least for the moment.

It was a nice touch. Done with a certain flair. If I wasn’t feeling all grumpy this morning because I can’t get my hair curly like it was yesterday, I’d be forced to reevaluate my opinions of the afore mentioned Microsoft blogger. But, I’m feeling grumpy, so I don’t have to. Ah, don’t you just love being female and having the excuse of hormones to be nasty?

UPDATE: Pascal points out some potential security flaws with myComment.

Endnotes:
^*1*Well, it has the potential to. At the moment it has to be on one of the big-six blogs that CoCo can deal with. Hit that snag this morning with Performancing.com…^Back
coComment, comments, conversation, MyComment, Robert Scoble

I’d like to remind you all that there are just a few days left to vote for the name you want for the Bright Meadow penguin.

If you haven’t already voted, take yourself to the sidebar and make your opinions known.

I’ll be announcing the winner sometime on Thursday afternoon (9th Feb).

It’s an odd day when someone plinks you all excited that they found a leper (a skeletal leper that is). I have some very strange friends.

I’m sorry to my tech-minded readers, but I feel the need to make my blog girly for a moment.

I’ve been a bit down for the past couple of days and, as nothing makes a girl feel better quite like a pampering session, and because I was starting to resemble a shaggy-dog, I rang the local hairdressers on the off chance they had an appointment today. They did.

The cut was nothing drastic, just a trim, because I am still growing all my layers out, but I felt this irrational desire for curls today, so I told the hairdresser that. He wasn’t sure curls were doable – my hair is straight and heavy, but he was game if I was. I certainly was (I have a very cavalier attitude to my hair, ever since I shaved it all off a few years back), so out comes the diffuser and the mouse. Ten minutes fluffing later, I am left with a head of curly hair! I’m not sure who was more shocked – me at how good it looked, or the hairdresser at how well it worked!

It’s now a few hours later and, whilst the initial extreme curliness has dropped out, it is still far from straight. I am really going to have to practice and see if I can replicate this look at home, because I love it! I’ve always wanted curly hair (we girls are never happy with what we got given). And, to top that off, the last remnants of my ill-advised 2004 dye job have finally been cut out. My hair is now its natural colour all the way through for the first time in… *counts back on fingers* since college!

Anyway, if you are curious as to what makes Cas happy – at the moment, the joy at having found a hairdresser in Southampton who cuts hair well and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg is near the top of the list. Whilst it cost a bit more than I pay back in Somerset, well, I’m no longer living in the sticks so it’s understandable. I will definitely be going back to them.

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 🙂

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 😀
coComment, comments, conversation