These few days off from school (we have an extended week-end here in Switzerland) are helping me get back on the coCo-track, and I’m picking up some interesting posts and ideas as I make it through the long collection of recent blog articles mentioning coComment.
Cas of Bright Meadow finds herself using coComment to help her identify spam. User SootleDir notes that if you help search engines find your coComment user page, the links on it will get indexed. (Is that good or bad in the long run, I find myself thinking?)
Over at To Encourage and Equip, Tally reflects on how people comment, and tells us coComment helps him not be a drive-by commenter. A drive-by commenter is somebody who leaves a comment on your blog and never comes back.
I like this concept of the drive-by commenter. Personally, I often comment when I read an interesting post on a new blog I just landed on, if only to indicate to the author that I read it, appreciated it, or that it sparked some reflexion in me.
And indeed, the problem is that in pre-coComment days, I usually forgot where I left the comment, and as Tally says, rarely read the answer to my comment unless the author e-mailed me or people visited my site from his/her blog (then it’d show up in my referrer logs, and I’d think of visiting it again).
With coComment, I find my behaviour changing, and I wonder if we’re not going to discover some other type of "drive-by coCommenter" — the bookmarking one: I comment much more easily because of coComment (I know my words won’t get lost, and I know I can follow the conversation). I now find myself commenting much more systematically on new blogs I discover, because I know that it will automatically add them to my coComment user page.
What about you? How do you comment? How has coComment changed your commenting habits? Do you also find yourself using the Your Conversations page as your blogroll?
technorati tags: cocomment, spam, indexing, commenters, habits, culture, behaviour, drivebycommenting
Thanks for the post. I like the drive-by commenter definition, may we use it? I think is tells the story very well of what cocomment does. By tracking a viewing responses you can stay in touch with your users. Also like you mentioned you can discover other conversations.
Thanks a lot, let us know if you need any help or questions.
Joaquin