The ability to search and find information in blog comments has been identified by many “in the know” as one of the bigger challenges in blogland in 2006. But I have a simpler problem - tracking replies to my comments on other peoples blogs. Those who use Wordpress and the “Subscribe to Comments” plug-in like me allow commenters to get e-mails when replies are posted. Unfortunately, we are in the minority.
The other day, CoComment was launched to great buzz. Initially I was dubious - why would I go to yet another web-site to find out about replies to things I have written on someones blog? But I was in a hard-of-thinking mode. These guys provide an RSS Feed of replies to your comments.
For non-techies reading this, it means that you have a pseudo-blog which you track in your blog reader (Thunderbird, Bloglines, Rojo etc) and which consists an aggregation of other peoples replies to your comments on yet other peoples blogs.
Once I realised this, I signed up, and now I just click a button in my browser every time I have written a comment. I can then completely forget about what I have written until someone replies and it appears as a new item in my blog reader. Most excellent. This means they can store all of these comments, which means comments will effectively become searchable. Are they going to offer this themselves or wire into Technorati or even Google? It is invitation-only right now but there are plenty of nice people handing out those invites so it should be easy enough to get sorted.
[tags]coComment, Subscribe-to-Comments[/tags]
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