Blogging Fingers’ Guide To coComment
By Matt Jones on Sep 5, 2007 in Blog Marketing
I recently wrote how to get pr4 links from coComment, but I feel like I missed out on really exploring coComment for what it is.
I’ve been spending a lot more time on coComment to see what else they offer.
Nifty Features
With all this talk of trading comments to make your blog look more popular, coComment is an easy place to arrange such things. You can add friends (of course) and share comment threads with them. I can see this being used for reciprocal commenting and much like any other social network, the more you are ’seen around’ the more coCommnets will be made on threads you comment on. Becoming known for leaving funny or informative comments would be a great way to quickly build a reputation on coComment.
Not So Nifty Features
coComment lets you shareyour comment threads on popular social bookmarking sights. At first glace at that you wont bat an eyelid, but a couple of seconds thought reveals how pointless this is. Who ever heard of a list of comments hitting page1 of digg? What makes more sense is this works in reverse as well because coComment also tracks comments you make on digg, flikR and YouTube etc.
One of the coComments I tried to leave was repeatedly given an error (in the screenshot below), which was very frustrating especially as I knew the comment wouldn’t drive much traffic. It felt like I was being denied doing a good deed. coComment are still in Beta so these problems should be ironed out soon.
Potentially Nifty Features
One of the available tools gives the ability to have a ‘top users box’ where you insert a snippet of code into your blog and it displays a list of your top coCommentors. They have to be using coCommnet to appear in the box and so it is another example of ‘if everyone did it, it would work’. It is very similar to the top commentators plugin and if coComment becomes popular it could replace it providing a few tweaks are made:
Why Are Some Conversation Links In Bold?
On your main page where your conversations are listed, some of the links are in bold and some are not (e.g. in screenshot below). The ones in bold are the ones you have not yet clicked on to go to the coComment version. Clicking ‘view blog’ does not stop them being bold, you have to click the main link which sends you to the coComment version where you can add other coCommenters as friends or favourites.
Traffic Driving Tip
As well as my black/grey hat idea, there is another perfectly reasonable excuse to track comments you make on your own blog and that is because they can drive traffic using tagging. By visiting ‘coCommunity - tags’ you can find blog posts related to what you want to talk about. Blogging is one of the most popular tags and as a result some of the conversations tagged with it have large amounts of comments from coCommnet users. As coComment grows, tagging comments you make on your own blog will drive sizeable amounts of traffic. I’m sure this post will receive comments from coCommentors as a result of some strategic tagging.
Top coCommentors, Top coCommented Sites, Top coCommented Blog Posts
Naturally there is a list of most commented on sites which is obviously a good thing if you are on it. The numbers here are surprisingly high with TechCrunch having over 36995 coComments. There is also a latest coCommented list (on the same page) which is beneficial for everyone. As well lists of top sites there are lists of top individual blog posts and of top coCommenters.
Points Of Interest
Many of us think A-listers don’t tend to leave many comments but with coCommnet you could visit that A-listers page and see what they have been commenting on. Proving identity could be an issue here because no doubt some bloggers will set up accounts pretending to be someone famous to attract more attention.
coComment isn’t 100% accurate in displaying the number of comments there are on a thread, for example it says there are 11 comments on my post about pinging Feedburner when in fact there are 7 and 3 trackbacks.
Conclusion
coComment is an innovative site that has found a empty niche and I’m sure it will fill it. I’m going to be tracking and tagging every comment I make on Blogging Fingers in order to monitor the amount of traffic it sends.
You can visit my coComment profile page and add me as a friend.
Technorati Tags: coComment, share, comment, Top Commentators, innovative
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I rarely use coComments but with all your great tips I believe I should start use it more often! Thanks for another great article!
[…] Blogging Fingers’ Guide To coComment » This Summary is from an article posted at Blogging Fingers on Wednesday, September 05, 2007 […]
I’ve added you as a friend Matt, if you could do the same I’d appreciate it. My username is ‘CristianR’ .
P.S : I’m also tracking this comment
. Great article !
IngaOz I’m glad you like it, thanks
Cristian I’ve added you too, I can see “I’m tracking this comment with coComment” become a typical line from spammmers lol!
I used to use it before the redesign - now I dont like it - its not as functional as it was.
Great article. I think it is valuable to revisit networking tools now and then anyway, just to see if they have been improved or moved off the radar screen. I added you to my faves, and hope you will do the same for me. Cheers!
interesting new feature. Thanks for pointing it out. I’m just testing now.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the fantastic post. We are sorry you experienced the error message, we are working on solving that issue. We also appreciate your “potentially nifty features” list, we are glad to receive any suggestions. If you or your readers have any questions, comments, feedback, don’t hesitate to contact us via our blog or send me an e-mail at joaquin@cocomment.com! Thanks! Joaquin
I will make sure I add you as a friend.
It’s been a while since I used cocomment but I’d give it a try again and see the nifty features.
I might have to spend a little time and try them out again. I had gotten the really BETA version over a year ago, and I really liked it.
Then, they updated several times, and I pretty much stopped using them a couple of months ago.
I was getting a LOT of those errors that you’ve shown above. I also figured that most people were adding the “subscribe to comments” or “notify me by e-mail of follow-up comments” options that it wasn’t a huge deal.
Between your “greyish” hat tip before and this post, I’m think I’m going to have to give them another chance.
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