This sounds like a great idea. I often leave comments on a frequently updated/commented on site (with lousy article navigation, no less), and it's really a pain to keep a tab or a link handy to keep up on the discussion. I'll gladly give this coComment thing a try. In fact, I'll test it out on this comment right here! Here's hoping to see Collision Detection up on the most commented list.

Well, I am a genius—I didn't read far enough ahead to notice that you have to click the bookmarklet during the submission. Now I'm hoping this shows up on as few listings as possible so nobody witnesses my error.

Well, it looks like the opportunity for great riches has once again slipped through my fingers. My father said that I would rue the day that I chose to major in oboe performance instead of computer science, and I guess he was right. Oh well. If the idea catches on, I wonder if it will become known as the 'mentosphere? That would be cool.

metaly, yeah, I'm going to try it out too! I'd love to be able to quickly parse all my comments on other blogs.

Daniel -- the oboe??

But everyone knows that Mentos are actually oblate spheroids...

To me, the cool thing about the blogosphere is not so much in tracking your own comments, though this clearly has value. The real value is to be able to track someone else's comments, and by doing so to drag one's self through the wider blogosphere. Take Clive, for example. We find what he has to say interesting enough to visit his blog every now and then, and the listing of other blogs on his blog serve as a static endorsement of those blogs, and that's pretty much how the current system works. But, let's face it, that endorsement that this list provides is quite tangential. It doesn't really tell us much and while we might occasionally click on one of these other links, this system doesn't very effectively propel us through the blogoshere. The commentosphere could change all of this by allowing us to track the thoughts of other people through the blogosphere/commentosphere. If we found out that Clive visited blog X and was a frequent commenter there, wouldn't that count as a greater endorsement than a static listing of blog X on his own blog? IF people become interested in following the comments of others through the blogosphere/'mentosphere, I predict that people will have a much greater incentive than they currently do to leave behind comments. The quality of those comments would also matter a great deal, and people would encounter more blogs than is currently the case. Despite comments being enabled on many sites, the blogosphere heretofore has been mostly unidirectional: someone collects a lot of information, puts it up, and the rest of us read it. Once in awhile we leave behind a comment, but there currently isn't really a strong incentive to do so. The commentosphere should make the conversation bi-directional.

In fact, there's no reason to restrict this idea merely to thoughts that you might have. Imagine that reviews written on Amazon, along with the comments left in the blogosphere/commentosphere, being part of your self-same digital/cyber avatar. Wouldn't it be to Amazon's advantage to have such reviews part of a system like this? I would argue that it is. How 'bout a toaster you bought on Amazon? Instead of running a blog and manually entering this information, whenever you bought something, it would be almost totally automated. Once you bought the toaster, you would have the option to add this to your digital avatar. After a specified amount of time, you would receive an email asking you to rate it, and this rating would become part of the toasters digital avatar! As this goes, eventually, whenever you wanted to buy a toaster, you would simply type 'toaster' in to an avatar search engine, and then you could see the aggregated reviews of thousands of people. We might expect, then, the quality of toasters to soon undergo dramatic improvement. If someone wanted to sell an inferior toaster, they would be required to adjust the price to match the level of quality as determined by toaster users.

Now you might ask why anyone would want others to know what toaster they recently bought. First of all, a lot of people wouldn't. But one thing I've noticed over the years is that people like to talk a lot about the stuff they buy. And this is expected since the stuff we buy is as central to identity these days as anything else. Without conveying this information, how else should we expect others to know who we are?

Think about the implications where Search is concerned. Currently you have to compete in this madcap auction to gain search engine visibility. It's not about the quality of your sevice, its about how well you understnad how to get ranked, and how much money you have to pay for a click. As a conusmer, you may be just as likely to click on ad whether its there organically, or whether someone paid money to get it there. But the position of the ad is really all you have to go on. For all you know, the the company listed ten pages back which you might never find is just as good or even better. IF you were to search for a product or service on line, wouldn't it be more meaningful to see what other people had to say about the product or service you were thinking about buying? This way we move toward a true meritocarcy.

In summary, comments are an important first step in giving wider representation to digital avatars of people, objects, and services. Given the importance of consumerism, no human digital avatar would be complete without some nod to the things we buy. Besides, annoucing what we've collected is all part of assessing status, and people are all too happy to talk about objects in their collection. All companies with something to sell would be wise to opt in because it would lead to much more effective and lower cost advertising. It would also save money on product research. Search would improve dramatically by becoming more meaningful and by becoming more of a meritocracy.

Sorry about the double posting, Clive. Anyway, I wanted to add one final, but crucial thought to the previous post. In the commentosphere, a person's profile will likely rise according to the quality and quantity of comments posted. The stature of some of those who comment might rise as meteorically as some who now blog. Thus, they might begin to weild a great deal of influence. If, by buying something, that product or service were added to a digital avatar, someone searching for that product category might be persuaded to make an identical purchase based on a review. It would make sense, then, to enable someone to make a purchase directly through such a link, and once the purchase was made, to give a percentage back to the person (commenter) who provided guidance to the product (or service) in the first place. As Clive mentioned in his recent NY Magazine article, people are now using advertising as a way to get paid for blogging. Why not imagine a system whereby a person might get paid to comment? Of course this would provide the ultimate incentive to comment. You will judged by the thing that should matter most (in my opinion): the strength of your thoughts and your analytical ability.

Supercool posting, sir!!

I quite agree that having commentosphere dynamics included would make search much richer. It makes me wonder: Does Google -- or other search engines that target blogs specifically, such as IceRocket or Technorati -- include "the number of posted comments" at a blog as a metric of the blog's authority and value? Because obviously, if a blog posting has a lot of comments, and particularly longer ones (length of a text being, as semanticists have discovered, a surprisingly accurate single predictor of quality content ... go figure), then that posting could reasonably be considered to be high-quality.

This is interesting stuff.

(I'll remove the extra duplicate posting!)

Yes, given that the value of any Web. 2.0-like site is its level of conversation and community, one could easily imagine that each participant's conversation would become sufficiently valuable that it's worth money, eh?

It sounds like coComment is a great idea, but has a fatal flaw. It can't tell you on its summary page if there have been replies to your comments. Well, it can, but only if those replies came from other coComment members, which 99% of the time won't be the case. Man, so close.

Actually, looking at the old discussion, a good question came up. Why doesn't TypeKey do this? It seems like it would be nearly trivial for them.

Peter, yeah, a very good question! I've no idea. Typekey has a near lockdown on the commentosphere as it is, but some people still avoid it because it's a pain in the ass to sign in. But if there were an added value to signing in -- and keeping track of your postings and being alerted to new replies would certainly be huge added value -- I bet many of the remaining hold-outs would flock to register.