Can Co-Owned Comments Improve Online Conversations?

I feel for the clients and PR pros tasked with finding, following and fueling relevant conversations on the Web. Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang nails the problem:

"Social Media is disparate and fragmented, making the conversation difficult to track, find, and use."

Owyang foresees brands using tools such as FriendFeed as a social media press release "to aggregate their social assets, and then to spur on a conversation." PR pro Steve Rubel claims FriendFeed is far more than an aggregation site or a community layered on top of others:

"It's a recommendation engine that surfaces content (both pro and amateur) via your peers...."

I'm as willing as the next geek to sign up for a useful, free service. However, FriendFeed, SocialThing and others are niches of niches without the scale or usability to affect most companies' bottom lines. There's hope, however.

In the Financial Times, Chris Nuttall reports comments are being freed from the blogs:

In the past, a web user’s comments were trapped on the site or blog where they posted them. Now, services are allowing commenters to establish their own identity and reputation and to aggregate in one place the remarks they make all over the web. A new wave of software and services, including coComment, Co.mments, Commentful, Disqus, Intense Debate, MyBlogLog, Seesmic and SezWho, enable users to create profiles, earn ratings for their comments and track their contributions and those of friends across the internet.

Ironically, the FT.com doesn't offer any community, commenting or sharing features you might find on other CMS systems such as Clickability. More importantly, comments taken off site are still a challenge to follow. I signed up for the half the sites linked above, and every one of them has a major flaw so far. coComment and co.mments fail to track what I write every few posts. Disqus only works with blogs that replace their own platform's commenting system. MyBlogLog requires my passwords and still doesn't seem to offer an easy to way collect my online thoughts.

Even with dedicated professionals helping clients monitor the Web, the costs of tracking comments in conversations can be prohibitive to frugal, focused firms. What, I wondered, would help solve the problem? Well, what if any comment on any site was automatically identified with a unique tracker and imbued with enough metadata to seek out like-minded publishers, articles, commenters, communities or hosts?

We already have RSS for syndication. We already have a set of rules called RDF for creating descriptions of information on the Web. And we already have broadcasting agents such as Facebook Beacon. Someone out there should be able to whip up an XML standard to meet the challenge.

As I commented on Rubel's article and shared in a bookmark Owyang's, I want to see the notion of comment co-ownership, where every remark is identified with a unique tracker and imbued with enough metadata to automatically find like-minded publishers, articles, commenters, communities, or hosts seeking it. (Think Creative Commons license meets RFID chip — in code.) Comments with those qualities can better spread the news, aggregate the conversations, and enable valuable content to gain popularity for all the stakeholders.

Comments

[Kawika Holbrook]

Dave Winer tackles part of the problem here: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/06/09/whoOwnsYourComments.html

Daniel Ha offers up a commenter's bill of rights here: http://blog.disqus.net/2008/05/30/a-commenters-rights/

[elpollo]

Very good post and ideas. Thanks for trying cocomments. First I would like to have more information on what kinds of sites we were not able to track your commments, we are always looking for bugs. So having users send us problems is the best way to have an effective tracking service.

I agree with you that comments need to be freed from the original blog, as we do it at cocomment by making a copy of it which stays with us regardless if the original post is deleted.

As for your suggestion to "identified with a unique tracker and imbued with enough metadata..." any comment we track has an id that can be then be linked with people/posts/community. As for creating a link directly we are still not there but it is a great idea, working on it.

[kawika]

@elpollo, thanks for stopping by. I started using coComments in November though the bookmarklet in Firefox. After working for a few comments, it seemed to stop tagging sites I requested. I deleted the bookmarklet and re-added it, with no luck.

I switched to co.mments, which seem to do better until last month, when it too stopped capturing.

I went back to your site today and tried to load the Firefox extension, thinking I'd have better luck, but instead got this message:

"coComment will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates"

I'm more than happy to test new Web-based features on behalf of our team, but I refrain from recommendations until I've had long-term success. Our needs are simple but tough: Track any comment we want, on any site, by any person, and any response to that comment if we wish, all in one place.

We want to follow conversations in an RSS feed if possible, but when they exist on multiple sites with limited accessibility and reporting features, we see more reconnaissance work than budgets allow.

Let me know if I'm missing something here. We're always on the hunt for better tools and tactics.

[Kawika]

Stowe Boyd of /Message writes "...as commenting and other microbloggingish activities becomes more and more like blogging, people will want to have the same controls on comments and Tweets that they have traditional expected with posts (and maybe microads?). Soon, they will be first class elements of the next blogosphere, one which is dynamically recomposed by every participant through the agency of next generation Son of Twirl, Twitter, and Tumbler applications." http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/08/blogging-20-mem.html