Blogging for non-Bloggers
I happened to see incoming hits from co.mments.com on my admin console. I’d never heard of this, so I tried to go to the site and was asked to sign up. No thanks, I’m not that motivated to track down referrers. Note to startups: hiding behind a login screen isn’t good advertising.
I was curious enough though to wonder what this service did. Scoble mentioned co.mments a while back his summary was that it “turns comments into RSS”. co.mments.com describes itself this way:
Use co.mments to bookmark posts you want to follow. It tracks new comments for you, so you don’t miss out.
Don’t we already have the wfw extensions and Atom’s threading extensions that do the same thing? I do have my own blog as well, and my general policy is that if a comment is anything substantial, I’ll post it here instead. I suppose if I didn’t have a blog, I might be interested in aggregating my comments – is that the target market here?
This trend of offshoring comments seems like the latest fad in the weblog world. There’s CoComments, co.mments.com, then maybe Shyftr is in that category too. There’s really a market for comment services? It that you can’t make money as an aggregator anymore? Or is it simply a bad idea that several people had at the same time? NewsGator was actually allowing users to publicly comment on posts over a year ago. I think I’m being generous to say that the feature was lightly used. Maybe co.mments.com offers a better implementation, but I’m still not moved.
— Gordon Weakliem
Comment
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I use co.mments to flag specific posts that I want to see replies to. Most sites I read don’t have comment feeds, and even if they did I wouldn’t use them. I don’t want to read every comment; I just want to be notified if there are follow-ups on specific posts that interest me.
— Matt Brubeck · 22 April 2008, 15:48 · #
The point of WFW and the atom threading extensions is that you get per-post comment feeds. I think the real problem is that very few aggregators support them.
— Gordon Weakliem · 28 April 2008, 10:27 · #
It’s not just the aggregators. Most publishers don’t support them either. (Your own feeds don’t seem to include any WFW or threading elements, for example.) So even if I used a comment-aware aggregator, I’d still need a third-party service like co.mments for blogs like this one.
— Matt Brubeck · 5 May 2008, 14:40 · #