A year ago, I blogged about a question that Daniel Luke, a Collision Detection reader, emailed to me: Why isn’t there a tool that lets blog commenters keep track of all their comments at various blogs? After all, many people who aren’t themselves bloggers are prolific commenters, and those “commentosphere” conversations are often as rich — or richer — than the original posts from which they spawn. Being able to quickly collect together and parse your comments would be a very cool way of reviewing your thought processes of the few years — much the same way a blog functions as an “outboard brain”, in Cory Doctorow’s formulation.

Anyway, in a nicely recursive fashion, that posting of mine was heavily commented upon, and several people pointed out various elegant hacks that commenters had used to collate their comments. But I still hadn’t seen a specific tool that existed solely for doing this …

… until today, when Daniel Luke pointed me to coComment. As the creators describe it:

coComment is free, and will help you keep track of the comments and conversations you and others are making on blogs.

Did you ever lose track of a conversation because you lost the URL of the post you’ve commented on? Have you ever wished to be informed when someone responds to your comment, rather than frantically refreshing the page looking for a reaction to your latest comment? How much would it improve your life if you could see all our conversations in one easy and simple page?

coComment will address these issues by giving you an easy and seamless way to track and follow your online comments and conversations.

I’ve no idea how well it works, but the evidently the designers have been absorbing the Web 2.0 mojo: Their page listing the most-frequently-commented-upon blogs and postings uses the classic Flickr style, where point size increases with popularity.

(Thanks to Daniel Luke for this one!)