When I work on co.mments, I focus on making it easy for you, adding the features you asked for, and improving the “behind the scene” engine.

I also take time off to think and reflect what it all means. How co.mments changes the way we talk with each other through blogs. How it puts the focus back on the individual blog. And you, the blogger.

Jeremy puts it in words better than I could:

And that is the interesting part. He tracks the conversations through the comments submitted through his service. Instead of looking at the full ginormous blogosphere, he is able to look at the conversations that his users are finding important. Think about that: he’s getting a magnifying glass view of the blogosphere, through the comments.

Last night I got to talk to Jeremy about all of that. It was a breath of fresh air.

Beyond the old-new AJAX, the raise of tagging and other valleymemes. We talked about where the tech bubble is going, and what parts of it reach beyond the valley enclave (hint: not much). He’s one of the few who live in the mix of things, but can see beyond the hype.

We also talked about the decline of Web advertising (another valleymeme coming up?) and what will happen after. I can tell you co.mments will take part in that. More in a future post.

Anyway, go read Jeremy’s post. He talks about co.mments, but also five other monitoring services that are key, if you want to do great PR. There’s a couple new to me, I’m going to check them out later this week.

If you’re using FeedDemon 2.0 (the best feed reader for Windows), you can easily track comments on blog posts from FeedDemon.

FeedDemon adds a set of icons at the top of each post. The arrow icon lets you e-mail, bookmark or blog the current post. You can set FeedDemon to track blog posts with co.mments by adding it as a “Blog Publishing Tool”.

As you can see from this image, click on the arrow icon, select Blog this News Item and then select Configure Blog Publishing Tool.

Then add a new Blog Publishing Tool with the following URL:

http://co.mments.com/track/track?url=$ITEM_LINK$

Next time you want to track a blog post, simply click the arrow icon, and from Blog this News Item select co.mments.

Smiley Cat has 10 tips to improving the comments section of your blog. Why?

For many blog posts, the comments section - where the discussion occurs - is as important as the post itself.

Consequently, it’s worth taking the time to make your comments section as user-friendly and as attractive as the rest of your site.

It’s worth reading these tips and picking the ones that work for you.

And if you are making changes to your blog and looking for some inspiration, they also posted 66 blog comment examples.

Over the past couple of weeks, I made some incremental UI updates.

Some tweaks to the styling to make conversations and comments easier to read. If you’re using keyboard shortcuts you’ll notice the scrolling improved and the pointer is sticky when moving between pages. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t work right with Safari 2.0.

I also got rid of the confirmation dialog that popups when you click Remove, and replaced it with an Undo button. It’s now easier to delete, and if you make a mistake, just undo the last action. You can also undo tracking a new conversation, and clearing the new comment count.

I’d like to see more Web apps adding undo buttons, so tonight I’m releasing a plugin for Rails with the undo feature. It’s written for Rails, but the code is simple enough that you can port it to any other language. So if you’re building a Web app, or know someone who does, you can find the code here.

First an apology, while I was doing the upgrade I broke the tracking engine and a few of you saw an error when trying to bookmark conversations. I fixed those, and hope we’ll have a smooth ride for the reminder of the day.

Working with browsers is never easy. You spend the time getting it working with Firefox, test it for a few days, release it. And then you have to go and do the same thing for IE and Safari. Just a few subtle differences between IE and Firefox, but they do take a while to figure out.

Now back to working on the tracking engine.

A great post by Amy Gahran:

If you view your blog as part of a public conversation, rather than a mere publication, then an easy way to attract more interest and interaction becomes obvious. I call it “strategic commenting.”

For me comments are a great way to talk to people right there on the blog. A great post is not a conversation, a great post starts a conversation. And they tend to flow very naturally when you’re commenting.

Sometimes one post leads to another one. You might be influenced by one post and want to write another one. Or you might want to direct people from one blog to another, because the audience is different. I think I’m doing that right now

So go read Amy’s post, she nails it down brilliantly. I bookmarked it so I can follow the comments, but also so I can go back and read it again. And if you have more tips, please share with us.
Via Guy Kawasaki.

Many of you asked what blogs are currently supported by co.mments. Right now the list includes WordPress, Blogger and recent versions of MoveableType. I’m also tracking posts from Typo and TextPattern, and Flickr photo comments work.

It would be easy to put a full list on the Wiki, but I want your help with that, so I’m going to start here.

Let’s put up a list of blogs that do work, but also what you want me to support. That way I’ll know what to work on next.

Here’s the current list of blogs (and other sources) I have, part from the Wiki part from e-mails I received:

Blogger (*)
Digg.com (*)
Flickr (*)
MoveableType/TypePad (*)
MediaWiki-based Wikis (perhaps at least the “My watchlist” page)
MetaFilter (*)
MySpace
LiveJournal
PunBB powered forum thread
SourceForge discussion forum
Textpattern
Vox
WordPress (*)
Yahoo 360

(*) Currently working.