This might help. . . thanks to Karin
In my post ‘How to keep mailings environmentally friendly’ a few questions were posed that needed to be answered by someone else. When the person I invited visited the blog and posted his response I popped an email to the readers who had left questions to let them know. Karin H - who frequently posts valuable comments - was one of the people I emailed.
Karin kindly replied to say she already knew about the reply because of a comment tracking utility she uses. So I decided to check it out: www.cocomment.com
I discovered there are two ways coComment can be used. You can register and have any comments you make - on any website - tracked so you can see other readers’ replies and follow the conversational thread.
Or, the one I was more interested in, you can integrate it with your blog to allow readers who comment to choose if they would like to know when any other comments are added.
So as from this post (if I’ve set it up properly - and I think I have with the swift technical support I got from the coComment team) you’ll see under each post some extra buttons: comment, track and share. (See the P.S. I’ve added below).
If you would like to use the tracking features you do have to create a free account with coComment (you can do that from here). And you can still leave a comment in the normal way without registering with coComment.
Do you think this is a useful feature to have on this blog?
~ Carol Bentley
P.S. I’ve turned the feature off for the moment because I hadn’t realised the javascript adds banner advertising - which I certainly do not want on here. I’m checking if it can be used without the advertising. If it cannot - and comment tracking is something you’d like to see on this blog - I’ll check for other ways of adding a comment tracking feature.
P.P.S Now activated - see the comment I posted as a test.
30th March 2009 at 6:35 pm
Wow! I have to say how impressed I am with the coComment teams speedy response. On average they responded to each of my questions within 1.5 hours, in one case within 23 minutes!
So it is now all sorted - without advertising banners - and I’m just waiting to find out what you think.
Carol
31st March 2009 at 7:31 am
Carol: thanks a lot for installing coComment on your blog.
Tracking and sharing conversation are available in our small toolbar inserted just bellow the comment text area (the icons on the left). To register to coComment, you just need to click on the left side of the toolbar. It is free and done in a few seconds.
Once registered, a user can track conversations using his coComment RSS feed, coComment web site or our browser extension (updates are notified in the extension icon and in our browser side bar). Conversation can be tracked by explicitly clicking on the track button, or when commenting.
When entering a comment, a user can add some tags: tags can then be used in coComment web site to display only selected conversation, and also via RSS feeds to track only some conversations.
Sharing is a very useful feature to invite people to participate in a conversation.
Registered users can install our browser extension and benefit from coComment features on any blog: our toolbar will be inserted automatically once our extension detect a commenting feature on the page.
More details can be found in our “About” section on http://www.cocomment.com/about.
Enjoy conversations !
31st March 2009 at 9:26 am
Hi Carol
Glad to have been of service, but for you - as WordPress user - there is an even more ‘elegant’ solution.
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
This plugin (only works for WordPress) allows commentors to be emailed the minute another comment is left on the post. I really like this plugin and am ‘pestering’ Typepad to have something added too.
It is a really fast and effective way to keep the ‘conversation’ flowing.
Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)
p.s. not sure what happened to your cocomment javascript, can’t see the extra buttons
31st March 2009 at 9:27 am
Hi again, think I found the ‘reason’ the buttons don’t show - when I went to my cocomment account it said: unavailable due to maintenance
Karin H
31st March 2009 at 10:44 am
Hi,
Sorry for this. We had to shutdown the service for a maintenance. It should be back up in a few minutes.
1st April 2009 at 11:28 pm
Thanks Karin for the alternative. That’s useful for anyone with a WordPress blog to know about.
I think as Christophe has been so supportive and taken the trouble to visit and give some useful info I’ll see how this goes for a while.
Unless it becomes a problem or my readers say they don’t like it I’m OK with it for the moment.
Carol
P.S. I think the buttons are now showing OK - but do let me know if they do a disappearing trick again!
2nd April 2009 at 6:19 am
Thanks Carol
Regarding the alternate option: coComment also gives the option to be notified by emails of updated conversations (I forgot to mention this….): you can set this in your coComment profile (for registered users). But I think that one advantage of coComment is that you can choose to be notified without commenting: you can track a conversation even if you do not enter a comment.
2nd April 2009 at 9:51 am
Christophe, you might shine a light on this.
What I found weird (and intriguing) was I could see all comments in the ‘my conversation’ tab of my cocomment account even when Carol still had to approve your first and second comment and my first comment (which had a link into it and was put in ‘queue’).
This way you could even hold ‘hidden’ conversations
Karin H
2nd April 2009 at 10:02 am
The reason for this is that your comment is sent to our service at the same time you submit it to the blog. But we are totally unaware of the moderation of the blog.
But, as a blog owner, Carol can delete any comments submit from this blog in our service.
2nd April 2009 at 4:10 pm
Thanks Christophe, that’s what I thought was happening.
Still can imagine ’secret’ conversations this way
Karin H
3rd April 2009 at 9:39 am
Actually coComment provides another way to have “secret” conversations on any web page: when you click on the coComment icon in your browser (only if you installed the extension: the icon on the top bar of the browser) a special application will be started (we call it the launcher).
From the launcher, you can start a new conversation. This conversation will be visible on coComment web site and to anyone using our extension).
But: if you create a private group in coComment (a group that is visible only for people you invite) and attach this new conversation to this private group: only the group members will be able to see and participate. This is a really secret conversation.