I want links, you want links, everybody wants links! Now, there is a new way to give each other even more links: Use coComment!
What is coComment?
CoComment is a comment tracking service. You can install their toolbar; afterwards when you leave a comment on a blog, that comment thread will be logged on your coComment account.
The main function of this service is to permit you to keep track of conversations on blogs. It’s pretty handy for that– I sometimes forget where I left a comment. Later, I want to go back and read any reaction. But. . . I forgot where the conversation took place!
How does coComment create Links?
When you leave a comment at a blog, a link to that blog is created on your profile page. (Oh, you can also evidently follow conversations without leaving a comment. That creates a link as well, and it’s pretty handy!)
Anyone can click those links to find blogs where I posted comments. Eventually, if your friends join,they can click your links to follow conversations you found. Plus, people can search on tags to find conversations about topics of interest. You can also create groups (I created knitting. I may need to invite people!)
So, clearly, coComment creates links to the blogs you comment on.
What kind of links does it create?
Pretty good ones! Matt Jones at blogging fingers noticed Technorati counts them toward rank! He also says these links are on PR 4 pages, but I don’t see that rank on my toolbar.
Can I avoid giving links to people I disapprove of?
Yes. You will be can blacklist site and prevent those comment threads from appearing on your coComment account. With the toolbar, you’ll see a link to “blacklist”. Click that, make some choices and save.
So, how can I get myself links?
That’s obvious: get your commenters to join coComment! Then they can leave comments to your blog.
What should I do now?
Go sign up for coComment. They have very nice step by step features that will tell you how to install the co-comment toolbar. Install it.
Then, skip their instructions to test at their blog. Come back here and leave a comment at my blog and tell me you joined. (Then I can dash off and make you a friend, which seems to have some benefits for both of us.)
Oh, and remember, my comments are dofollow. So once you’ve left at least three comments, your links get followed. Plus now, by using coComment, you return the favor and I get a link. 
Afterwards, return to coComment, and check your account. You’ll see a link to this conversation at co-comment, you can follow the full comment thread over there. Of course, if someone responds to your comment, and you want to respond to them, you still need to return here to comment. That would be more traffic for me.
But I bet you’re still wondering how you can get links for your blog? Well, you leave comments at your own blogs, right? You’ll only get one link per post, and your coComment profile can only give 1 vote to your blog profile, but still, a link’s a link. Then, also get your friends to join– and comment at your blog. And, heck, why not become dofollow and publicize that?
If you are a Wordpress blog, it’s easy to dofollow. Just get Lucia’s Linky Love, install. It works out of the box, but you can also make some choices that help you discourage human comment spammers.
Afterwards, publicize your do-follow status by joining Tricia’s dofollow list and Bumpzee’s dofollow group.
Let me asure you, you’ll get comments! And the dofollowers are a savvy group. So, you’ll probably like a lot of their comments.
Summary of coComment
I think the service will be handy because I know I lose track of conversations I want to follow. Sometimes I can’t remember the blog I visited and just drop out for that reason. Plus, sometimes, I’d like my friends to be able to find some blogs where I left comments. The extra links are a bonus.
Hi Lucia,
OK, I’m up for trying this so I’ve done the necessary and even managed to send you a friend request over at the site
I’m still reading up on the workings of it all but it seems straightforward enough.
I left a question on their blog about the “groups” feature. I started a knitting group, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to add conversation to the “group”.
It seems I discovered coComment just when they rolled out some mods, so some features may not be quite right for a little bit of time. But my comment show up, so you can get your links!
We used cocomment for awhile when it first came out on one of our blogs. Overall consensus was it was a good idea but it needed work. Hopefully they’ve cleared up some of the issues like the red x syndrome linked in my signature above by now.
I’d rather use the email notification to follow-up, on new comments assuming there is an option to escape a thread when/if the comment threads go off-topic or the trolls and spammers come sniffing around.
I don’t see the red X.
I like email notification too– and have it at my blog. But some blogs don’t provide that option. So, coComment deals with that. coComment could potentially be better for budgeting my time– I can find the posts I want to track when I want to rather just when someone comments.
But yes, there are some “issues”. I’ll be trying to figure out some of the features– but for now, I do like giving the link-juice to friends blogs!
Lucia – The red x thing was over a year ago (just follow the post I linked in my first comment to read about it and see screenshots).
I just took a look around cocomment it seems like things have changed. Hopefully for the better. I notice they show me as having zero friends. That’s strange, they must have reset all the friends lists because over a year ago on there I was one of the more active people on cocomment.
My how a year can change things on the web
(btw, I followed back here from the email notiifcation — you can see how fast that works)
TDavid– yes the email notification is fast.
I left two comments at Sebastian’s blog and they don’t show. Now I need to figure out what happened!
And BTW, you might want to check your email notification script. I received three emails when I left my first comment. One that welcomed me for leaving my first comment here and advertised your Wordpress blog plugins (unexpected promotion). And two other ones with your above response.
I just received two more emails from my last comment. We only need one email, not two for notification
Something is amiss.
Five emails when only two were expected and desired. Definitely something to look into.
It’s turning out to be a bit of a mare this
Any idea how you post to the forums? All I can seem to do is read them.
I am encountering the inability to claim my blogs even though I’ve followed the instructions to the letter! I hit “synchronize” and CC just keeps coming back with “no blogs claimed”.
Maybe it will work tomorrow…..
Great idea. I just started an account (dragonden) and put in a friend request on there for you. Claiming my cocomment page via my technorati account seems to have gone smoothly. I haven’t posted in hours though so it’s not showing any of my posts in my blogs area on cocomments.
I managed to claim my blogs and synchronize. I left a comment at their blog asking how to post at forums. (I’m almost glad to read Maurice has trouble with that since I was feeling rather stupid.)
Still, with regard to giving other people links this is working! It would just be nice if all their features worked.
Lucia, This looks really good. At the moment I keep a list of all my comments in Excel! I’d been toying with the idea of writing a Firefox Extension / WordPress Plugin combination to track them, but it seems there’s no need… Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll definitely give it a try (but not till I get my plugin update finished).
I’ve spent a couple of days on things but I’m not much further along. I’ve also noticed that CoComment often seems to only track my comments – that is on my own blogs – but doesn’t pick up anyone else’s even though I’m subscribed to the thread. They claim they will be out of Beta 24/9 but they still have a way to go I think. I also noticed that Stephen’s comment didn’t appear for me there on this thread, but Tricia’s did.
I want this to work because it’s a great idea but still a lot of ??? at the moment.
The forum issue made me feel dumb too Lucia, so as you say, it’s good to know we both had difficulties
Say hi to “Mo” (from us feline lovers on GC).
I will have to have another look.
The Technorati claiming was actually something I prompted them to do some time ago and the implementation was much better than I expected.
I had people complain about the plugin on my blog a couple of time so I had to remove it, and on a plugin clearout in Firefox it didn’t make it back.
I really should add it, as long as they have finally managed to fix commenting on blogspot and Digg, which just got insane.
What also wasn’t very good was the way they picked up a post title as the name of a blog. Every post in coComments for my blog last time I looked used the blog name “Wordpress Trademark Spammers” which was a thread on my blog where I first commented back in November last year.
Tdavid you do have a point, but as far as I am concerned legally at least a blog owner has a right to send a single direct email thanking you for a first comment, though if it has some kind of promotion in it then maybe it should also include contact details.
Subscribe by Email by default doesn’t really comply with CANSPAM because commercial spam can be sent very easily, all it takes is a commenter dropping an affiliate link.
I wrote a patch some time ago to add some additional text to it.
Feedburner also doesn’t comply, but they are owned by Google now so I doubt that will ever be fixed.
[...] Blogging tips for the week: To increase links to your blog, get a better page rank and encourage traffic, advise your friends to try coComment. I discuss coComment at my blog. [...]
Andy – the thanks for the first comment part itself was fine, I was taken back by the duplicate emails for one notification bug (since fixed it seems, thank you Lucia) and the fact that there were multiple promotional links in the thanks email.
Don’t spoil a good deed, you know?
One very brief promotional signature link would have been fine, perhaps something like: Lucia’s WP plugins [link].
And if there is going to be a separate email sent on that first comment — it might be wise to put something in there so your commenter doesn’t think they’ve been added to some list. That is a spam concern.
How would anybody here feel if my first comment looked like this:
I doubt seriously that anybody in the comments section here or on most other blogs would appreciate this.
I think it’s great Lucia makes her own plugins and shares them with the world (me too) and certainly don’t want to silence that thunder, but emailing everybody this who leaves a first comment with a link to each plugin seems like overkill marketing to me. I don’t mean this disrespectfully, I mean this helpfully and honestly. Sometimes subtle sales works far better than in your face marketing and I speak this from experience.
Perhaps most telling is Lucia said herself (paraphrasing) that she needed to go back and tone up this first mail, so it seems she acknowledges that this email needed some tweaking.
There’s an old saying about first impressions
I don’t think Lucia is a bad person or anything and I certainly wasn’t calling her a spammer.
I simply was voicing my surprise over the situation and that a thank you for the first comment email probably shouldn’t be promotional, lest the whole thank you part comes out looking like a phony attempt to market another blogger.
Certainly wasn’t talking CAN-SPAM compliance and/or whether it was legal or not, etc. It was more about appropriate marketing — a much more subjective thing.
Heck, I leave the checkback for subscription to comments default checked on our main blog (readers can uncheck if they don’t want to get the emails and unsubscribe in each email). I think it’s helpful to receive these notification emails so that we can join in the conversation as I’m doing here.
The more I think about this, perhaps it would be better to program the thank you for leaving your first comment so that it wasn’t even necessary to send a completely separate email?
Just mod the subscribe to comments plugin for this extra message after the very first comment is left. Using a separate plugin doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it? Other than for convenience to the blogger maybe? Or for the more cynical: marketing.
In this day and age, I think it’s wise to send only what people agree to receive via email. It was more acceptable to do more of this kind of stuff in the past and not set off whistles and bells. In the situation with the email notification there is no mention that there will be any other email sent. It creates unnecessary and, as I think in this case, unwarranted and undeserved suspicion.
Different subject: the most recent comments all have (new comment) after our names (and the links are all nofollow). Was a plugin that counted comments reset or something?
TDavid,
I’m glad you told me! I’m afraid I had slowly added email responders individually, and since I don’t get them, I didn’t realize quite how many were going out.
There’s one plugin that is supposed to let the admin (me) click an envelope to respond to an individual whether or not they’ve subscribed. So, I do use that rather than respond here and then send a private mail.
Mind you, that plugin is supposed to recognize that someone has already subscribed– but it didn’t. So, since you’d subscribed, you got two emails! (All other subscribers got one.)
Then, there is comment relish which sends the first email– which I’ve turned off for now.
So, in the end, you were bombarded by email. In contrast, Andy wasn’t. But I don’t really want to bombard anyone with email.
I think the idea of a plugin that collects all the features together that can make sure that a person only gets no more th an one email per comment is a very good one. Thanks! (I “copy admin” optional feature might be nice so the admin can see what’s going out would be nice too!)
@TDavid–
On the nofollow issue: You haven’t been entering a URI in your comment, so there is nothing to follow.
On the other no-follows: Someone requested I add an optional “time” toggle. I’m using it and my comments are always nofollow for the first 24 hours and then follow the rest of the rules I chose afterwards. (I require 3 “matching” name, email and url combinations.)
During the 24 hour waiting period, the “nofollowed” comments say “new comment” after them. (I figure this note can help people like Andy who check tell that there is a waiting period and he can scan up and see Maurice is followed.)
Also, comments by “lucia” are always nofollowed on my blogs. I figure I don’t need another internal link to my own blog!
When
Naturally I knew I wasn’t leaving a link (still not because way up at the top my first link is still nofollow) and nofollow not applying to me directly, but for example I was curious about why Andy’s link was nofollow and the Knitting Fiend’s trackback, plus the redundancy of the message after our names (new comment). Isn’t it obvious it’s a “new comment?” Am I missing something?
And why would someone want a 24 hour time toggle on nofollow on the comments left? Are they not moderating the first comments or something?
I do understand and respect as a fellow plugin author adding features that users like, so I’m not criticizing why that feature is in your plugin, but this just seems like a really silly, useless feature to me as a webmaster. What am I missing?
Frankly, I think some people are getting way too complicated with how they’re using nofollow. Either give it to people or don’t. Don’t make it some kind of obstacle course to navigate to get it. If the same type of effort was put into making the site content quality better as to what links are and aren’t getting nofollowed imagine what the reader response would be like?
This is the part of NoFollow that has troubled me since day one. That it would be used for situations it wasn’t intended. When it came out there was no talk about it using it on text link ads, but over the last year that’s been all the talk. It remains no surprise to me that it’s done absolutely zero to combat spam. It’s just made it worse because now people like those of us who are dofollowing links have even bigger targets on our sites.
I understand the need and importance of moderating comments, and as a site gets bigger the need for a comment policy, but the search engines aren’t going to freak out at your site if on spider pass #7,357 you have a link nofollow and then on #7358 it’s dofollow. Sure, if you link to bad neighborhoods you can be punished but that should be part of normal comment moderation. Just disallow those types of links altogether, don’t nofollow them, just remove them period.
The goal should be to spread the love to those who leave legitimate, on topic comments and thus encourage and promote making the content of the site better and more useful for current and future readers/visitors.
Sorry, to continue by separate comment, but I felt my last one had reached an acceptable link. I have one more comment about nofollowing your own name on your own blog.
Why are you nofollowing your own name, Lucia, really? I mean do you really want to tell the search engines that your name isn’t worth following? That’s the machine message being sent.
I wouldn’t link your name to the blog people are already at, I’d link it to your profile or an important page about you or to you (your plugin page perhaps?) — and thus the engines will increase the relevance to your name, as they should. They should see it as a vote by the site to where our name should link to.
Dave Winer used to make a deal out of when you linked on his name he wanted it to go to his profile page. He clearly understand that if his name was linked to his bio, that would increase the relevance of his bio for his name. Matt from Wordpress is the #1 Matt in Google because every Wordpress install by default links his name to photomatt.
My name when I leave comments usually is linked to my business site and you bet it is DoFollow. Shouldn’t you be telling the search engines to follow your name to the place you most want them to follow?
I’m probably starting to wear on some readers nerves here, so I’ll bow out. People who want to read what I have to say know where to find me
Or can use Google on my name if they don’t.
Hope everybody’s weekend is going great. Remember: what comes around, goes around. Spread the love!
@TDavid– on the 24 hour feature, I agree with you. I think the match 3 is enough and the 24 hour afterwards is silly. On my knitting fiend site, I just wait for the match of 3 sites. That said, after I write a feature, I like to use it a little while to test and make sure nothing bizarre is happening.
Anyway, it was added because some people are paranoid someone might dash in, leave 3 and get a follow for some tiny bit of time. They wanted the time too. I figure “no harm in that”. So… I added the feature. I have the “new comment” there so that the few people who keep lists can quickly see the feature is being used. (Very few people use the time feature. )
I agree with you totally on the goal of following comments. At the same time, I am finding I get fewer human comment spams now that some of the spamming companies have figured out there is a hurdle to jump before they get followed.
So, using the plugin means less work for me!
That was pretty much my goal when I wrote the plugin.
@TDavid: On not linking ‘lucia’, strangely enough, I ranked very highly for ‘lucia’ before I first installed the normal dofollow plugin. I think I had the #14 google result. Then, immediately afterwards, I lost rank on my first name!
So, I’m thinking ‘lucia’ is an uncommon enough name that suddenly dumping a zillion of my own comments from “The Knitting Fiend” made Google think I was google bombing ‘Lucia.’ So, I figure the remedy is to not link ‘Lucia’ from my own blogs.
People are finding me with searches like “linky love” etc. In that case, that’s what they are looking for anyway.
Ok I’m in! Thanks for the info.
This is very cool! I’ve already got mine all set up, plus I’m a member of the bumpzee dofollow group and I’ve asked to Tricia to add me on her list as well. Yeah!
Darn it, I forgot I had to first click on the cocomment thingy in my toolbar before….I sent the comment. sigh…..
I have had CoComment several days now and I find that it really slows things down when I want to make a comment.
Cool idea. I will download the coComment to give it a try now …
[...] been hearing about coComment here and there for a while now. I had been planning on taking a look and giving it a shot but I just [...]