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!