Tumblr to Capture Comments?

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The other evening, I was explaining that I still used coComment to capture the comments I made on other blogs. As always, people try to suggest alternatives: co.mments or disqus, for example. I appreciate the suggestions, but they show me that I haven’t managed to make myself clear.

CoComment does two main things:

• track conversations you participate in (or want to keep an eye on) so that you are alerted when a new comment is added to the thread
• capture the comments you make on other blogs so that you can collect them somewhere or republish them.

I use mainly the second feature. I’m not that interested in tracking all the conversations I take part in. Every now and again I am, and co.mments does indeed do the job, in an ad hoc way. Disqus is quite exciting and also allows centralization of the comments I make with the system (if I got it right), but it has the great disadvantage of still being too “blogger-centric” instead of “commenter-centric”: sure, I can install disqus on my blog (as a blogger), but it isn’t going to help me capture or track all my comments until all the blogs I visit have done the same.

So, like at the end of a messy break-up where you’re still sleeping with your ex, I’m still using coComment for the following:

• capture the comments I make all over the place and republish them in my Tumblr.

That’s it. One thing coComment does pretty well, despite all the criticism I can make to the service, is capture comments I leave in a variety of comment forms (from WordPress to FriendFeed and Typepad and Blogger and even home-made in some cases) and spit them out in an RSS feed.

Yesterday, an idea dawned on me: what I really want is for my comments to be published in my Tumblr. Maybe we can come up with a way to do that directly?

I use Tumblr loads, and love it. The main thing I actively use it for (I’ve embedded a few RSS feeds in it) is for quoting interesting passages off blog/articles that I read. It’s very easy:

1. highlight some text on a page
2. click on the Tumblr bookmarklet
3. Tumblr automagically recognizes it as a quote, and pops up a window which you use to publish it.

The result of all this is that I have a Tumblr which is full of quotes, comments (thankfully coComment seem to have removed the nasty ads from the RSS feed I complained about), and other things (videos and screenshots, for example).

I’ve been thinking a lot (but not writing, I know) about how these new tools in my landscape, which weren’t there 8 years ago (in a few days!) when I started blogging, are modifying my publishing and interaction habits. The panel I moderated at BlogTalk in Cork was about that, actually, but I think we only brushed the surface.

So, back to the point for this post: I’d like a hack for my Tumblr bookmarklet — or maybe a separate bookmarklet (by Tumblr or a third party) which will publish the comment I’m submitting to my tumblelog. It would work a bit like the coComment bookmarklet: click it to activate it at some point before hitting submit — and it does its magic when you submit the comment.

If you like the idea, head over the Get Satisfaction and add your 2 cents.

Tagged as: coComment, commenting, comments, disqus, get satisfaction, idea, publishing, satisfaction, suggestion, tumblr