The MacAlba

[These thoughts are made from the viewpoint of a bystander, rather than as a participant - coComment is still ramping up and membership is currently by invitation only. I'm not a member.]

Comments pertaining to articles or items within a specific blog are normally kept as a collection of comments attached, directly or indirectly, to that article. Comments can maintain flow of conversation between blogger and reader and are an integral part of the blogosphere.

If an individual is a frequent commenter, across tens or even hundreds of blogs, then there’s no way of accessing their entire contribution as a whole. A conversation generally usually only takes place within a specific blog (usually, but not always).

That’s where coComment comes in.

CoComment will collect all related comments from coComment members into the one conversation, and publish that conversation. But I wonder how much this will split the blogosphere into the “coCommenters� and the “non-coCommenters�. The haves, and the have-nots. A conversation could become two conversations. Each hidden from the other.

Another feature of coComment is to permit a member to list their comments centrally on their own blog, say. So as well as having a blogroll, a blogger can also have their own “comment-roll� or “conversation-roll�.

Thanks to the wonders of RSS feeds, the latter “comment-roll� can also be accessed via a news aggregator. I suspect that in the case of some individuals their conversation-roll could be as, or more, interesting than their blog.

The current blogosphere has multiple, duplicate, “ping� servers. These servers collect “pings� from bloggers when a new blog article has been published. These pings are collected and used for various purposes including search engines collecting and indexing the newly published content.

Will we see multiple coComment-like services at some point in the near future? Will they interoperate, or will the comment-sphere be further fragmented? A conversation on server-X, a different conversation on server-Y.

… and how will coComment differentiate themselves from looking something like an up-market chat-room or bulletin board?

It will be very interesting to see if they can convert the high’ish level of blogosphere chatter into something sustainable.

[Update: within hours of me writing the above, coComment opened for business. Anybody can now sign up].

Technorati Tags: cocomment, Internet