In November 2008, I made my CoComment Co.mments Switch and now just received a notice that Co.mments is shutting down. Argh. Given that the reason for the switch is that I wasn't happy with CoComment, what should I use now?
I empathise with you, as I packed in with Cocomment a while ago - came back in - packed in again. I saw you'd started with co.Comments but didn't pursue that one.
Since then I've been trying to keep track by ticking email-follow-up comments. That's okay but I get a helluva lot of emails and not all blogs support this method anyway.
At one time I started keeping a paper log - duh! Back to the steam age.
I will be watching the comments to this post with interest.
Disqus comment system is AMAZING. I use it on my personal blog (tofugu) and my company blog (eduFire). It's really great for getting discussions going on blogs, and has a really pretty interface. I haven't seen that many 'blogger' users use disqus, though I know it works on blogger. You should definitely check it out.
Disqus looks really cool, but it doesn't solve the problem I'm going after unless I can get the rest of the world to adopt it. What I need is something to remember where I've left a comment and alert me when someone follows up.
Oooh, I see. Yeah, that's something else entirely. I didn't even know things like that existed. Let us know if you find a good replacement, something like that would be really useful!
I've had a closer look at Backtype, having signed on and tried a few other things.
It looks easy to use - permits various different ways you can review your comments, like by whose blog you put them on (lists the sites for you) or by latest comments.
Your Backtype account has an RSSfeed which may not be so useful - yet to explore the usefulness of that, but it's there.
So far it looks better than some methods I've looked at - I'll keep you posted.
I used Commentful before co.mments, after CoComment became too flaky to be usable (which happened much sooner for me than for you!). I'll be back to Commentful probably for the time being. It at least is stable and reliable.
The biggest drawback for me with commentful is that it doesn't put the full text of the comment into the RSS feed. Basically it's just a notification; you have to go to the original site to read the comments. Better than trying to track manually though.
Argh. Reading through the comments to this post just now I was about to click my co.mments bookmarklet to follow the conversation. I'll definitely miss co.mments. I'll try BackType, I guess.
Thanks, Tony! Actually, since writing the above I've followed the suggestion above to try out BackType. It looks like it will probably serve my purposes well. I don't care about subscribing to people's comments en masse, but like co.mments you can subscribe to an individual post using a bookmarklet. I think it will work. The only downside I can see is that they don't always recognize the blog. (But there is another bookmarklet you can use to submit a blog for addition to their crawled blogs.) So, I guess I'm happy.
13 comments:
Kia ora Tony
I empathise with you, as I packed in with Cocomment a while ago - came back in - packed in again. I saw you'd started with co.Comments but didn't pursue that one.
Since then I've been trying to keep track by ticking email-follow-up comments. That's okay but I get a helluva lot of emails and not all blogs support this method anyway.
At one time I started keeping a paper log - duh! Back to the steam age.
I will be watching the comments to this post with interest.
Catchya
Disqus comment system is AMAZING. I use it on my personal blog (tofugu) and my company blog (eduFire). It's really great for getting discussions going on blogs, and has a really pretty interface. I haven't seen that many 'blogger' users use disqus, though I know it works on blogger. You should definitely check it out.
Disqus looks really cool, but it doesn't solve the problem I'm going after unless I can get the rest of the world to adopt it. What I need is something to remember where I've left a comment and alert me when someone follows up.
Oooh, I see. Yeah, that's something else entirely. I didn't even know things like that existed. Let us know if you find a good replacement, something like that would be really useful!
Here's a shot in the dark.
Backtype. Heard of it? Credit to Julie Starr whose site The Evolving Newsroom I've just come aross.
Credit where credit's due and all that. I haven't contacted Julie yet, but will do. She has just started to explore it. And she's in New Zealand!
Catchya later
Kia ora Tony
I've had a closer look at Backtype, having signed on and tried a few other things.
It looks easy to use - permits various different ways you can review your comments, like by whose blog you put them on (lists the sites for you) or by latest comments.
Your Backtype account has an RSSfeed which may not be so useful - yet to explore the usefulness of that, but it's there.
So far it looks better than some methods I've looked at - I'll keep you posted.
Catchya
Ken - someone suggested Commentful. So I will try that. If you can try Backtype and see how it works for you. Maybe one of us will be happy. :)
I used Commentful before co.mments, after CoComment became too flaky to be usable (which happened much sooner for me than for you!). I'll be back to Commentful probably for the time being. It at least is stable and reliable.
The biggest drawback for me with commentful is that it doesn't put the full text of the comment into the RSS feed. Basically it's just a notification; you have to go to the original site to read the comments. Better than trying to track manually though.
The great thing about co.comments was you could subscribe to comments without leaving a comment.
Sometimes I like to subscribe to comments to hear what people have to say, but I don't really have anything that I want to add to the conversation.
None of the other services mentioned here allow you to simply track comments without leaving one. If anyone else has a suggestion, I'd be interested.
Argh. Reading through the comments to this post just now I was about to click my co.mments bookmarklet to follow the conversation. I'll definitely miss co.mments. I'll try BackType, I guess.
Debra - what a classic comment and I appreciate the recursive nature. :)
Thanks, Tony! Actually, since writing the above I've followed the suggestion above to try out BackType. It looks like it will probably serve my purposes well. I don't care about subscribing to people's comments en masse, but like co.mments you can subscribe to an individual post using a bookmarklet. I think it will work. The only downside I can see is that they don't always recognize the blog. (But there is another bookmarklet you can use to submit a blog for addition to their crawled blogs.) So, I guess I'm happy.
Isn't it amazing what 'blogging' can do?
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