A different problem arose recently – as I was reading more and writing less I found it annoying to track all the comments debates I was in. Going through all the flagged posts, clicking them to get to the page and finding all the comments is kindof annoying.
One way of doing this is the solution that Vitaly Friedman is using on his notebook. It seems that his RSS includes the number of comments in the title of the post which makes my reader think it’s a new post. I don’t like this idea much since on massively commented posts I get a new ‘item’ everytime which kindof clutters the reader.
I remembered that there is a web application that lets you track comments that I haven’t tried yet. It’s called coComment and I think I’m gonna try it now. I’ll probably review it in another post.
What I want from you (yes you, not the person staring in your screen from behind) is how you track your comments and conversations. Do you even make comments? Answers in the comments please :)
This comment is my first test of the coComment service. Will report if it makes any sense…
I don’t, since no tool did it the way I’d expect, when I evaluated them.
Keep us posted about coComment.
It seems that coComment only tracks my comments and not other peoples comments on the same matter. It seems logical since it would be kinda hard for him to recognise new comments.
One option is to implement some javascript code into the comments page which should make all comments trackable…
I almost killed coComment today, but then I found out that it actually does something good. It seems like it’s tracking all the comments made to this post – even those not made by coComment users. The annoying thing is that in auto mode it adds three JavaScript files to each site which kind of sucks. I recommend using the favelet instead.
Looks like coComment is what I was looking for. It actually updated the list of comments when I checked back today. And it even displays the comments so you don’t even have to go back to the posts page.
Glad it worked for you in the end! :-)
It sort-of works. I can’t really get how it works – for example tracking this currently shows 9 comments on coComment while I see 11 comments on the page. This makes coComment unreliable and therefore useless.
It’s also fun how the icon of the plugin keeps changing but I have no idea what the different icons mean :)
Although it’s been a few months since your post, comment tracking seems to be just as timely of an issue (or even moreso). I’ve been testing the new RSS readers to manage my feeds, but I comment extensively, and very few sites have email follow-up or similar capabilities.
I pondered adding the comment count to my TITLE tags the other day, but there are two problems: (1) from a usability standpoint, the readers constantly seeing it as a new post might annoy people, and (2) it will hurt search engine rank and possibly even cause duplicate content penalties.