More on coComment Advertising [en]

[fr] Malheureusement, coComment et moi sommes partis pour une "Séparation 2.0: quand les 'social tools' que vous aimiez ne vous le rendent pas." Le choix de leur distributeur de publicité est vraiment malheureux (un cran au-dessus du spam, à mon sens), et clairement, il n'y a pas de dialogue entre coComment et ses utilisateurs, malgré les déclarations acharnées "d'ouverture au dialogue".

A la recherche d'une solution de remplacement pour la saisie des commentaires, donc. Le suivi des conversations m'intéresse beaucoup moins que la centralisation de tous mes commentaires en un endroit.

I was alerted to this a few days ago by Nathalie, and after witnessing it with my own eyes — well, I’m going to go to bed a little later to blog about it, after all.

After preparing to slap ads in our comment RSS feeds, coComment is staying on the same ugly and obviously slippery slope by inserting ads in the cocobar:

coComment blog ads in cocobar

So, slightly more discreet than the big banners placed in the RSS feed, but not in very good taste either. Here are some examples of scrolling ad text:

  • “Want fast fitness results? Click for free info, revolutionary products.”
  • “Walk on the well placed warmth of radiant heating. Click now!”
  • “Free comparison of top car rental companies. Click here!”
  • “Click to create your dream holiday trip now.”
  • “Easy-to-use, advanced features, flexible phone systems. Click for more info.”
  • “Visa, MasterCard, AMEX & Discover. Compare Offers & Apply Online. Click here!”

Reloading a cocobar-enabled page will provide you with hours of endless entertainment. (I’m kidding — but there are more out there, of course.)

Now, I understand that coComment needs to “monetize”, though one could question a business model which seems to be based on revenue from scrolling ads and blinking banners. (I can’t remember who said “if your business model is putting ads in your service, think again”.)

There are ads and ads, though. Here’s a sample of banners from the coComment site:

coComment blog » Blog Archive » Advertising, Revenues and harsh realities

Commenting is sexy. HotForWords is the talk of the party at Geek Goes Chic

Commenting is sexy. HotForWords is the talk of the party at Geek Goes Chic

coComment blog ads

The screen captures don’t render the blinking quality of most of these ads, but I guess your imagination can fill in. Now, does anybody else than me feel that this kind of advert is just about one step above spam? Based on a few of the comments I can read on the post Matt wrote about the “harsh realities” of advertising, it seems not:

With all honesty, the banners displayed on the cocomment site are awful and are making the service look VERY unprofessional – totally agree with “disappointed” on this one. Few will argue that perception is 99% of reality, so with those banner ads making the site look like crap, the whole service becomes questionable. I felt like I was about to get a trojan into my computer when I first saw www.cocomment.com

there are other advertising partners that don’t crap up your web site with ads that flash in your face. most opensource projects are using google ad sens now (just an example) that displays relevant ads that look very subtle.

stan

I agree with some of the commenters here about the ad selection. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were unobtrusive AdWords or… something a little classier. It cheapens your brand. Think upscale! Or, at least, more upscale.

Allan White, in comment

Yes, there are ads and ads. These ones definitely make coComment look very cheap and dodgy, and I’m not sure it would encourage users to hand over credit card details to pay for an ad-free version. Also, what’s with the Hot For Words thing? I’m sorry, but this is not my world. coComment has obviously moved into a space which is very alien to my beloved blogosphere.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to state that you want to have a conversation to actually be having one (I guess that for starters, that last post would have pointed to the post of mine that contributed to prompt it). A conversation starts with listening and caring, and obviously, despite their efforts to prove the contrary, the coComment team sadly don’t get this.

What could they have done? Well, I’m not going to launch into a session of full-blown strategic consulting for an ex-client of mine (who didn’t seem to value my advice much at the time), but simple things like taking up issues such as the arrival of advertising with the people who use the service before actually dumping ads in their feeds unannounced could be a way of showing you care a little bit about how they feel. Understanding that apologies and justifications when you mess up do not erase the past also seems like a good idea. As my friend Brian Solis put it:

Making mistakes in social media is a lot like sticking daggers into a wooden fence. Just because you apologize and pull them out, they still leave the scars for others to see, and feel. Sometime apologies help people feel better, but they don’t fix perception. This is why thinking before engaging is critical to success in the world social media marketing. This is after all, about people.

Brian Solis

So, as I told Brian, coComment and I are headed for Breakup 2.0: when the social media tools you loved don’t love you back (yes, you can quote that one, it’s from me).

At the moment, I’m only using the service to “save” the comments I make, because I like keeping a trace of my writings (I used to collect stamps). Sadly, I’m not even sure coComment will allow me to walk out with all my data in an XML dump — I don’t see anything obvious in the interface for that, so if I am able to, it will probably be due to my relationships with the people who have access to the server. (I said “if”.)

The tracking feature is too confusing and overloaded for me to use — I can imagine using something like co.mments to keep an eye on the small number of conversations where I’m on the lookout for an answer. But I don’t have an alternate solution for “capturing” the comments I make. Copy-paste is a bit of a bore, and del.icio.us doesn’t capture the comment content — just the fact that there is a comment.

I’ve been thinking up an idea involving a Firefox add-on. It would have a bunch of algorithms to detect comments fields (maybe would support some microformat allowing to identify comment feeds or forms), have a simple on/off toggle to “activate” the field for capture (some right-click thing, much more practical than a bookmarklet or a browser button, because it’s always there, handy, wherever you click), would colour the field in something really visible when capture is on (red! pink! green!) without disrupting readability (I need to see what I type). It would capture the comment, permalink, blog post name (it knows I’m the commenter, I could fill in that info in the add-on settings), and dump the info in an XML or RSS file, or in the database of my WordPress installation, with the help of a WordPress plugin.

It’s a half-baked idea, of course, and I don’t have the JS skills to actually code anything like this. It should probably be a week-end project for somebody with sufficient Javascript-fu — if you’re interested in bringing it to life, get in touch.

Google Calendar Down in Flock? [en]

[fr] Google calendar ne semble plus marcher pour moi depuis un jour ou deux. Flock/Firefox. Et vous?

I haven’t been able to view my Google calendar in Flock (or Firefox, for that matter) for the last day or two. Anybody got the same problem? Known issue? I just get a blank page.

Response to Yvette: Loving Links in Posts Through Tabbed Browsing. [en]

[fr] Comment lire un texte plein d'hyperliens? Le mieux, à mon avis, c'est d'ouvrir les liens dans des onglets séparés en utilisant un navigateur comme Firefox. On peut ainsi facilement y jeter un coup d'oeil sans perdre de vue notre lecture principale, et y revenir plus tard si désir il y a.

Je pense qu'il est de la nature du web de nous disperser. Je commence à écrire un billet, en consultant mon matériel source, je me retrouve à répondre à un commentaire, et pour ce faire à mettre en ligne une saisie d'écran sur Flickr... J'utilise depuis peu un "mind map" pour me souvenir de ce que je suis en train de faire. Cela m'évite de perdre de vue ma tâche principale quand je suis plongée dans les ramifications des tâches secondaires qui en dépendent.

The best way to deal with reading links in a blog entry, IMHO, is to open them in tabs in the background. Then you can either go to the link page straight away to look at it, come back to the blog post, and read the linked page more in detail later.

To work with tabs, you’ll need a browser like Firefox, which you can download and install for free. Once you’re in Firefox, instead of simply clicking the links you want to visit, ctrl-click them (or command-click if you’re on a mac, like me).

Here’s a picture of what it can look like.

I find that there is something in the nature of the web that encourages one to get sidetracked. It’s a web, not a road! For example, I started writing a blog post, came to read this page (as “source” material), decided I was going to reply to Yvette’s comment, then halfway through thought “hey, I should show a screenshot of what tabbed browsing looks like!”, so took a screenshot, saved it as jpg, uploaded it to Flickr, added a few notes to it…

I sometimes find it useful to keep a mindmap current with what I’m doing, when the “sidetracks” start becoming “tracks” in their own right. In this case it’s not too hard for me to remember I’m actually trying to write a blog post (my main task), because the “secondary tasks” (visiting links, putting a screenshot on Flickr) are things I’m comfortable doing.

And finally, now, because this comment is becoming really long, I’m going to make it into a blog post and publish it on my blog instead. See how things go on the web?

Try Tails! [en]

[fr] Une extension Flock/Firefox qui permet de visualiser les informations présentes dans une page sous forme de microformats.

The Firefox extension Tails shows you what microformats are embedded in the page you’re viewing. Try it out here while K2 is still on! Thanks to Yoan for pointing it out to me.

Tail on CTTS

Flock, extensions, and coComment [en]

[fr] Une adresse de site pour convertir des extensions Firefox pour utilisation avec Flock, qui est un excellent navigateur. J'étais déçue de ne pas pouvoir utiliser l'extension Firefox pour coComment avec Flock -- maintenant je peux!

My ex-collegue and now friend Gabriel introduced me to the Flock browser quite some time back. I mentioned it quite a bit on my other blog but I don’t think I talked about here much.

Anyway, it’s great. It’s Firefox, but with all sorts of nice bloggy, flickr-y, del.icio.us-y stuff tied in. I’d like to get coComment integrated in there too.
(Disclaimer: I work for coCo.)

One thing that makes coComment really nice to use is the Firefox extension. Once you’ve installed it, you don’t need to do anything, and it automatically records all the comments you make (as long as the blog platform is more or less compatible to show them on your user page. Here’s mine.

The thing that bothered me when I started using Flock again sometime back was that I had to revert to using the bookmarklet (which, let’s be honest, is a real pain — who remembers to click on a bookmarklet before posting each comment? not I!) Today, as I was starting on my tour of the blogosphere to see what people are saying about coComment I came upon another Flock user who regretted the extension wasn’t compatible.

So, I headed to our internal bug-tracker to find out what the status of my request for a Flock extension was, and saw that Nicolas (coComment’s Daddy!) was asking for more information on converting extensions. I googled a little and here’s what I came up with:

Well, I installed the extension in Flock, restarted my browser, and after a painful start (wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was because of the extension or just good ol’ Windows acting up) it was up and running. I now have Flock running the coComment Firefox extension!

Let me know how it goes for you if you try it, particularly on other platforms. And if you haven’t tried Flock yet, you should. It’s really neat!

Intégrer coComment sur votre blog [en]

Vous savez probablement que je ne jure que par coComment, dans la genèse duquel j’ai eu la chance de jouer un petit rôle.

Ça sert à quoi?

Ça sert principalement à choses pour l’instant:

  1. collectionner ses commentaires faits sur différents blogs en un seul endroit, comme on peut le faire en les bookmarquant avec del.icio.us, mais de façon bien plus pratique;

  2. voir facilement si quelqu’un d’autre a répondu à un de nos commentaires — mais attention, ceci ne marche pas très bien pour l’instant, car coComment est seulement capable de suivre les commentaires de gens ayant un compte coComment.

S’inscrire

Ouvrir un compte, c’est super facile, il suffit de donner nom et e-mail et de choisir un nom d’utilisateur et un mot de passe.

On notera qu’il n’est pas nécessaire d’avoir un blog pour trouver une utilité à coComment. Il y a des personnes qui participent activement à la blogosphère à travers leurs commentaires, sans pour autant être blogueurs. CoComment est pour vous!

Rendre coComment plus pratique

Une fois le compte ouvert, coComment vous fournit un bookmarklet, une sorte de lien “favori” que vous pouvez faire glisser dans la barre d’outils de votre navigateur ou dans vos favoris. Ensuite, quand vous laissez un commentaire chez quelqu’un, vous cliquez sur le bookmarklet dans votre navigateur avant de publier le commentaire.

Ça, ça devient très vite barbant. On oublie de cliquer sur le bookmarklet. Du coup, notre commentaire n’apparaît pas sur notre page de conversations coComment. Il paraît qu’on peut maintenant cliquer sur le bookmarklet après avoir envoyé le formulaire, mais personnellement je n’ai pas testé.

Les commentateurs peuvent faire quelque chose pour se simplifier la vie. Les auteurs de blogs peuvent faire quelque chose pour simplifier la vie de leurs commentateurs.

Plus pratique pour moi qui laisse des commentaires

Pour ça, il faut utiliser Firefox. Deux solutions s’offrent à vous.

  1. Le script GreaseMonkey. Ce script vous évite de devoir cliquer sur le bookmarklet à chaque fois. Vous pouvez donc oublier coComment quand vous laissez vos commentaires, c’est tout automatisé. Sympa, non?

    Script, GreaseMonkey, chinois? Pas peur, instructions pour les nuls. D’abord, installer l’extension GreaseMonkey (non, ça fait pas mal). Pour ça, on commence par s’assurer que l’on a Firefox 1.5 (voir lien ci-dessus), puis on va sur le site de l’extension GreaseMonkey. Une fois là -bas, on cliquera sur le lien qui s’appelle “Install GreaseMonkey” dans la deuxième moitié de la page. On dit oui à tout ce que nous demande Firefox (oui on veut installer l’extension, oui, oui, OK on ferme le navigateur et on le rouvre…)

    Ensuite, on clique sur ce lien-ci qui va installer le script et on dit également oui à tout.

    Voilà ! C’est fait 🙂

  2. L’extension Firefox pour coComment. Même chose que plus haut, on clique sur le lien, on clique ensuite sur “Download coComment! for Firefox”, et on dit oui, amen à tout ce que nous demande notre navigateur chéri. L’extension me paraît moins utile que le script GreaseMonkey, car elle ne fait qu’ajouter le bookmarklet coComment au menu contextuel qui apparaît lors d’un clic droit (ou long clic pour les personnes qui ont un Mac). Mais il paraît que c’est utile parfois lorsque les commentaires sont dans une fenêtre pop-up. Personnellement, j’ai vu que ça ne marchait pas tout le temps, mais j’essaie quand même.

    Note: j’ai désactivé l’extension Firefox vu que je ne l’utilise pas. A vous de voir si elle vous sert.

Plus pratique pour moi qui ai un blog

Si vous avez un blog, vous pouvez faire en sorte que vos commentateurs, s’ils ont un compte coComment, n’aient pas besoin de cliquer sur le bookmarklet, même s’ils n’ont pas installé l’extension GreaseMonkey décrite ci-dessus. Cool, non? Pour cela, il faut rajouter du code javascript pas trop loin du formulaire de commentaires.

Le code est fourni à la fin de ce billet par Merlin. Comme j’utilise une version assez standard de WordPress, je n’ai eu personnellement qu’à copier-coller ce qui était donné dans le billet. Bon, faut encore voir si ça fonctionne 😉 Attention, donc, si vous avez un autre outil de blog, il faut peut-être adapter le code. Cet autre billet explique plus précisément quel rôle joue chaque ligne et vous aidera certainement à modifier le code si nécessaire.

Attention! Pour le moment, j’arrive pas à faire marcher ça. Plus de nouvelles dès que c’est réglé. Ça marche maintenant, mais il faut faire attention aux guillemets malins pas si malins quand ils sont dans du code

Oui mais… DotClear, autres plateformes de blog, etc…?

Pas de panique. Premièrement, il faut savoir que les gars de coComment bossent d’arrache-pied pour augmenter le nombre de plate-formes avec lesquelles ils sont compatibles. Si votre blog n’est pas compatible avec coComment, mais que vous pouvez modifier votre formulaire de commentaires, tout n’est pas perdu.

Le dernier billet que j’ai mentionné explique comment faire. Il faut donc rajouter un certain nombre de lignes javascript dans le formulaire, et voilà ! Je suis certaine que DotClear fournit toutes les informations nécessaires mais avec d’autres noms que ceux auxquels s’attend coComment. Il suffirait donc qu’un(e) DotClearien(ne) prenne le taureau par les cornes et adapte le javascript aux variables de DotClear (la version publiée utilise les variables WordPress). Si vous faites ce travail, rendez-le public sur votre blog, et je lancerai un lien dans se direction! Qui s’y colle?

Mise à jour: Nicolas propose en commentaire le code à intégrer à DotClear. Quelqu’un peut confirmer que ça marche?

Tracking Keywords: PubSub and Technorati [en]

[fr] Comparaison de PubSub et Technorati pour surveiller des mots-clés dans la blogosphère. Aucun des deux vraiment satisfaisant.

One thing I came back with from LIFT’06 is that what one should monitor is more keyword watchlists, rather than blogs. I used to have a few hundred blogs in an aggregator, but gave up using it ages ago. Too much to sift through, considering it isn’t my day job to do so.

During his talk, Robert mentioned that he used PubSub to track keywords like “Microsoft” or his name. Of course, it makes sense. Tracking topics that are of interest to you. I created a PubSub account and set up a few subscriptions to try to track things like mentions of my hometown, Lausanne, teenagers and weblogs, and of course my name. Tracking your name makes a lot of sense if you’re looking out for conversations. Think of highlighting in IRC: if everybody tracks their name in blogs, then you can just call out to them. Hi, Robert, by the way!

Now, this name thing. I guess tracking your surname with PubSub is all right if you’re named Scoble, but if you’re named Booth it makes things much trickier. I added my first name, but that didn’t help much if I omitted the quotes. And as people are likely to refer to me as “Stephanie Booth”, “Stéphanie Booth”, “Steph Booth” or even “Stéph Booth” that’s a bunch to track, but let’s say it’s manageable. But it rules out people who refer to me as “bunny” or even “Tara” (yeah, and if I start tracking those too, it’s not going to make things less messy).

What I really liked about PubSub is that it offers me an out-of-the-box sidebar for firefox. I can get a list of the recent posts containing my keywords in there, browse them, click, check, move on. It has highlighting too, and that’s really nice — helps me see straight away if the Stephanie Booth on the page is me or some homonym. (For some reason it’s not working anymore, but it was nice while it lasted.)

What I didn’t like is that it didn’t seem to be returning as many results as Technorati. Also, I wasn’t always sure if it was responding or not (I guess the current conversation around my name isn’t very busy ;-)). And the “Latest Messages” option only gave me the last three posts in each subscription. It gave me the impression of being a little incomplete in the results it returned. I suspect it isn’t really incomplete, but I can’t really nail what gives me the impression. In any case, PubSub and Technorati give different results for a search on “cocomment”

The slight unsatisfaction with PubSub made me go back to Technorati watchlists, which I had never really used. I like the idea of tracking URLs in posts. If somebody links to me, then it doesn’t matter if the person called me “Stéph Booth” or “Tara” or “la Mère Denis“, I’ll see it. I can also track links to my Flickr account and other blogs and stuff easily. Keyword searches work too. So, neat, I now have a watchlist page on Technorati with all my monitoring material. I can subscribe to each of them by RSS.

Gripes, however. And for the sake of it, let’s assume I’m hoping my watchlists will replace my NewsReader, and not go and live in it:

  • I can only expand one watchlist at a time.
  • Expanding a watchlist shows only the three last results.
  • I don’t have a compilation page with the latest results from all/any of my watchlists.
  • I’d like a sidebar!
  • Blogroll links keep showing up in Technorati search results. It’s nice to know you’ve been blogrolled, but you don’t need to be reminded of it each time you do a search.
  • No highlighting!

What it boils down to: I’d like a Technorati Watchlist sidebar for FireFox and highlighting of search terms or URL in the pages which are loaded from it.

Do you monitor keywords, URLs or search terms? Do you use PubSub or Technorati? Do you stick the results in your feed reader to keep track of them?

Update: of course, I’m much more familiar with Technorati, so there might be something about PubSub I’m missing completely. Feel free to educate me.

Lift: Thanks for the Videos, but… [en]

[fr] Problème pour visionner les vidéos de LIFT avec OSX et Firefox. Et vous?

I tried to get to the LIFT videos but I can’t read them. I have the latest versions of Tiger and Firefox. I spent a minute in a pop-up configuration window (that was nasty to start with), and then it just didn’t work. Can’t we have DailyMotion-style videos that “simply work”?

Audio works, though. Would be nice to be able to download it instead of stream.

As for the podcast feed, it asks me if I want to open NNWL. A little button to subscribe in iTunes would be really neat.

Problème de sécurité dans navigateurs non-IE (Firefox, Safari…) [en]

Un gros trou de sécurité dans nos navigateurs, semble-t-il. Pour une fois, les utilisateurs de IE ne semblent pas avoir de soucis à  se faire. Ne cliquez jamais sur les liens dans vos e-mails.

[fr] Shmoo exploit explained in French.

Je n’ai pas le temps de lire tous les détails, donc je vais laisser quelqu’un d’autre (avec peut-être des connaissances techniques un peu plus solides que les miennes) expliquer exactement de quoi il en retourne.

En gros, il semblerait que cet exploit fasse le bonheur des adeptes du phishing.

Si vous utilisez FireFox, voici les instructions données par BoingBoing:

  1. Tapez about:config dans votre barre d’adresses.
  2. Utilisez le filtre pour trouver network.enableIDN
  3. Double-cliquez sur la ligne qui apparaît pour que la valeur devienne false

Edit 09.02.2005: mise à  jour FireFox qui doit régler ce problème.

Comme je l’ai dit, je n’ai pas investigué cette histoire à  fond, mais les sources me semblent fiables. Revenez par ici pour voir s’il y a du nouveau. Gardez aussi un oeil sur le cosmos Technorati de l’article sur BoingBoing.

Au risque de se répéter: Ne jamais cliquer un lien dans un e-mail. Toujours copier-coller. Ne jamais cliquer un lien dans un e-mail. Taper l’adresse à  la main dans le navigateur.

Firefox Only For White Anglo-Saxon Males? No! [en]

Browse Happy needs testimonials from happy Firefox users who fall outside the “white high-tech anglo-saxon male” profile.

[fr] Browse Happy, un site qui encourage les gens à  se "convertir" à  Firefox, a besoin de témoignages de personnes qui ne tombent pas dans la catégories "homme anglo-saxon blanc branché technologie"... a bon entendeur!

Browse Happy is a neat site encouraging users to switch to Firefox, by publishing testimonials of happy switchers.

However, it does suffer from a problem: the people featured on the site tend to fit the white high-tech male anglo-saxon profile pretty dramatically. This strikes me as an unhappy coincidence, so maybe we can lend a hand in helping them gather a more respresentative sample of testimonials?

If you don’t fit that profile, and want to help spread the word that Firefox is for everybody… send in your testimonial!