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CoComment and the Conversation Index

A solution to tracking all those comments you leave on other peoples blogs — the conversations — has been crying out to be built for ages.

In fact, it’s surprising that no-one has really solved, or even attempted to solve, this problem until now.

I mused with some ideas around how to solve this problem myself, but never got my finger out to do anything with it. But it looks like CoComment is about to fill the void.

CoComment is still in private beta, but from what I can see it’s got a nice interface. You can see all comments made on all blogs by a given person (example), and all comments left on a given blog (example).

I see Lee Wilkins has got himself an invite, so perhaps he’ll give us all a review???!?

Finally, whilst we’re talking about comments and conversations, Stowe Boyd (always a great read) has posted his thoughts on the conversational index.

Stowe’s proposed the following equation to measure the ‘level of conversation’ on a given blog:

i = p/(c + t)

Where:
i = conversational index
p = number of posts
c = number of comments
t = number of trackbacks

Clearly anything above 1.0 is ‘broadcast’ rather than ‘conversation’. Stowe and also Don Dodge discuss in more depth.

BTW: this blog has 396 posts and 862 comments + trackbacks (although I have purposely semi-turned off trackbacks due to spam). That gives this blog a Conversational Index of 0.459 – which I think indicates there is room for improvement!

Many of my posts don’t attract any comments, yet I have over 300 feed subscribers and usually over 400 unique web readers a day… I wonder whether I need to change my tone to attract more conversation – let me know!

Published in Links

9 Comments

  1. Ben – cheers for the heads up, I was going to write one last night, but never got around to it…..

    Review of coComment en route

    [is it just me or does anyone else keep reading it as CoCo Comment?]

  2. Thanks for the heads up on that. It’s a problem myself and a few others where discussing a little while ago and came up with a half solution using delicious.

    Originally suggested by ben ward and expanded upon at morethanseven.net/experiments/commented-on-follow-up we had @commented-on del.icio.us rules.

    A review would be interesting

  3. Lee – I guess, it would have been an even better service, if they’d call it CoCo Comment. 😉

  4. I bet a comment from Dominik is awaiting moderation!

    Looking at the RSS for comments, I see dominik commented, but moderation doesn’t get in its way….

    So this is the question: how secure is it against blog spam?

  5. mimiqiao mimiqiao

    could you give me an invitation code? Co Comment, Thank you!
    mimiqiao# gmail.com

  6. Ben Ben

    Mimiqao, I’m sorry but I’m just another user. I don’t work for coComment so I can’t give you a code.

    Have you tried subscribing up for their beta via their site?

  7. Sorry 🙁

Comments are closed.