I tried Co.mments a while back. I ended up dropping it because the Firefox Extension stopped working when I upgraded. Seems like I was not the only one having issues with the old version.
Recently, I heard that Robert Scoble was going to give it a try. That was enough to prompt me to try it again. (My Public Page) Mr. Scoble says "It'll be interesting to see how the new version works"... My thoughts, ditto that. I really want it to work well.
I suppose the first issue is how you feel about comments in general. Some well known web authors think they may well be dead. I was surprised when Chris Pirillo wrote A Comment About Comments. Other authors would disagree though, Amy Gahran started a new blog in which the very title implies otherwise; The Right Conversation.
Hmm... So who is right? I like and respect all three authors I have mentioned. I read their feeds, follow their delicious post and over the years have learned a great deal from them. For now, I am going to assume that people want to comment. I know I sure do. Furthermore, I am hoping the the trackback to Scoble has people who can influence things make this work. I want this to work I was not too happy when I stopped using it the first time. Being able to track comments is a valuable resource even if one does not comment on an article.
I have been using the new co.mment service for about a day now. Here is what I have noticed:
- If I try and use the feed to display my tracked items in the sidebar of this page, I can not use the WC3 HTML validation service. I admit that I am overly anal about efforts to write valid code and, especially for things like ustream and stickam, I need to lighten up on it. The feed does not cause and error, it causes a utf-8 character encoding error and the page can't be checked at all. If you know how to fix that let me know.
- I decided to try the javascipt in the sidebar. Maybe I am not using it right. But I do not see anything in the sidebar.
- In terms of leaving comments. (I have not installed the javascript on the back end of this site yet. Likely by the end of this week.) The javascript over at lockergnome does not seem to add my comments to my tracking page. It could be that it takes a bit of time for it to update but, IMHO, this is something that the user needs to see almost instantly. If I feel a conversation is worth tracking, I want to be certain that it is actually being tracked.
I hope everybody takes this post the right way. I am NOT trying to be overly critical. I am also NOT trying to suck up to the authors I mentioned. I feel that co.mments is great idea and would love not to be disappointed by it's functionality. Heck, I would be happy to learn that it is not co.mments but something I am doing wrong in trying to implement it.
Sorry to be so wordy but I am rushing to get off to work and am going to post this without a proof reading.
