In February, Chris Garrett wrote about tracking your conversations. I use three excellent tools to help me do this.
1. coComment – I leave an average of fifteen or twenty comments a day on different blogs using coComment (see my coComment page). I have the new coComment Firefox extension, which is far better than the old Greasemonkey script and bookmarklet method. Whenever a fellow coComment user comments at the same URL as I have, the extension alerts me within five minutes.
coComment has made me more productive and able to track my conversations. I’m a coCo-nut. coComment lets me tag the comments I make for future reference, and helps me find people who make similar comments to mine or who frequently visit the same blogs I do.
2. del.icio.us – If coComment doesn’t work at a URL where I make a comment, I simply submit the comment and tag the page as “mycomments” in my del.icio.us account. The del.icio.us Firefox extension makes this easy to do (it takes maybe five or ten seconds).
3. co.mments – I’ve just started using this service. It looks like it may replace my del.icio.us tagging method, because in addition to remembering where I make comments, it tracks those pages for ANY new comments. Unfortunately, co.mments doesn’t yet allow me to connect with other commenters like coComment does – and I don’t know if co.mments even lets me publicly display the conversations I’m tracking.
I use these three tools to remember where I’ve commented and what I’ve said, and to follow the continuing conversations. Right now, I still go and visit the pages I’ve recently commented at, just to be sure. But these tools and others are constantly improving. Hopefully a tool will come along that will automate the process so I don’t have to remember to follow up on comments I’ve left – the tool would simply alert me. I’m an editor for the Know More Media blog network and I just wish there were an easy way to track all the comments our 50-plus authors leave around the Web!
What methods do you use to track your comments? Do you like any or all of the methods above? Please let us all know.
18 thoughts on “Three Free Tools I Use To Track My Conversations Online”
See you…Thanks, its great to receive such positive comments.
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For me the new CoCo FF extension is working quite well on most sites. I have it working now for nearly a month and it proves to be OK – I’ll keep it.
Here on p.com (Drupal?) it stopped showing up. I think some special code has to be inserted in the templates here on p.com to make it work.
… I want to know if it works for you, too. Certainly it needs tweaking. I sure hope IE 7 can work seamlessly with it. I love coCo and use it all the time.
@James: Thanks for the exclamation mark 🙂
I was too tired to look it up.
It seems like I have to verify the local URL here at p.com all the time for CoComment. I am sure it is a Drupal thing but still annoying.
@Brett: I will watch and see.
I’ve started using it again myself. It works well on sites where the comment or even blog post is on a permanent page.
Interestingly, it also grabs information off of page entries where there is no permalink. However, the link at cocomment is no longer valid. Your comment content is still captured, but you get a bad link.
This is halfway good, because your comment is retained, but bad as its not something you would want to feed around or anything as the link would be dead.
! is called an exclamation mark Markus.
I tried cocomment when it first launched but got sick and tired of it. I prefer using RSS feeds for comments or posts that I want to keep track on but LOL not everyone uses wordpress so I can’t always. I might give co.mment a go at some point.
What annoys me most immediately is that little red envelope just beside the CoComment sign in the status line. How can I deactivate it? I mean is it useful to know that very old conversations have new comments? I would like to switch that red annoying thingy off and start again. How does this work?
Just quoted the above from my comment on the CoComment test blog. On CoComment pages and on the test blog the red envelope was shown but not here on p.com. I am confused.
Now I clicked on the CoComment icon left of the address form and now the red envelope also shows up here. What does it tell me? I see that I have enabled some CoComment activity because I see a CoComment add-on below the p.com comment form.
I also have to click on that red mark (what’s the name for a ‘!’) to verify some p.com data. Here is a little trap! The page URL is identified as “http://performancing.com/node/2446#comment-1” – I have no idea why.
I signed up and installed cocomment shortly after that other Business 2.0 article came out mentioning them.
I had a number of bugs and problems with the service and stopped using it, meaning to come back in a couple weeks, hopefully after the bugs had been worked out.
I leave lots of comments all over the place (even though its probably not that apparent from my Performancing metrics.
I feel like I’m leaving content all over sometimes and I don’t like to leave an idea somewhere, where I may lose it and not be able to further develop a thought or idea triggered by a great conversation.
OK, I have also installed the CoComment Firefox extension. Let’s wait and see …
Thanks to recent updates, coComment is now my one-stop solution for comment tracking.
Trisha, I typically spend up to an hour each day commenting at blogs in the Know More Media network as well as other blogs that talk about the same topic as my blog (business blogging). Often, I comment at several posts on the same blog, but I’m also always looking for different blogs to comment on. So my answer would be a mixture of both extremes.
When you say you make ‘fifteen or twenty comments a day on different blogs’ – do you mean every day you leave comments on 15-20 totally different blogs? Or you have 20+ blogs that you regularly visit and comment at?
i wish it liked Haloscan
Thanks for your positive replies.
While co.mments tracks all follow-up comments on a given URL and coComment only tracks those left by coComment users, coComment does have a significant advantage over co.mments in terms of its website, which offers many more tools for tracking other commenters and joining various conversations. For example, I’ve subscribed to the coComment feeds of a few of my blogging friends, so I always know what they’ve been talking about lately using coComment.
The Holy Grail here for me would be a tool that automatically indexes all comments you make (unless you tell it not to) and notifies you automatically of any follow-ups. No more having to do that on your own. It would be like having a friend who always came up and told you what so-and-so had said about you, or what such-and-such had said in response to your idea. Sigh … that day shall come!
I’m giving coComment a try today. I’d heard of these services but never took the time to look into them. Thanks for doing the hard work for me! I think it was coComment’s bookmarklet/greasemonkey script method which put me off – ugly, ugly, ugly!
Great post!
I’ve not used either of the comment services, and I can’t say im inspired to do so. They seem like too much like hard work to me, but i do use delicious to track the few conversations i join each week. It seems to work pretty well for me…
Well, I’m going to give co.mments a try becuase if it follows all of the comments as you say then that will solve the problem I had with using co.comments. It was certainly very easy to set up an account and this page is now the first page I’ve tried to track. Thanks for the pointer.
That’s something all the old school Bulletin Boards and the old school forums still can do better. You register, you leave your mail address, you write and comment and whoops automagically you get a mail which tells you something new is going on everytime something in ‘your’ threads changes.
One of the reason why I am staying around her – it’s the recent posts page. It shows me what is happening. I don’t want to follow RSS comment feeds.
A bugzilla system in blog mode would be great. Somebody out there listening 🙂
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