SubscribeE-Mail Alerts
You asked for e-mail alerts, so I added two types of e-mail alerts. Both provide the same information as the Web feed, but in a slightly different way.
Digest e-mail alerts send you an e-mail with a list of comments in all the conversations you are following. You will receive an e-mail that groups several conversations together, an easy way to be notified. If you can’t check your Web feed often, or want to receive notifications through cell phone or PDA, digest e-mail alerts are a good choice.
Individual e-mail alerts send you e-mail alerts for each individual conversation. You will receive more e-mails than digest. If you use your e-mail client to group (or thread) e-mails, then you can keep track of all comments from the same conversation. This screen shot is GMail grouping two e-mail alerts for the same conversation:
To start receiving e-mail alerts, you need to follow these four steps:
- First, head over to your your account settings page and click the link to verify your e-mail address.
- Check your inbox, in a few minutes you will receive an e-mail from co.mments.
- Click the link in the e-mail to verify your e-mail address. You’re now ready to receive e-mail alerts.
- Again, head over to your your account settings page, click the “Send Alerts” button and choose whether you want digest or individual e-mail alerts.
For security reasons, you’ll need to verify your e-mail address once, and every time you change your e-mail address.
Afterwards, you can turn e-mail alerts on and off at any time, and you can always switch from digest to individual and back.
Posted by Assaf in Announcements, features on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006. You can follow any responses using co.mments, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Finally — track new co.mments by email! at FactoryCity
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:24 pm
[…] Now instead of relying on individual bloggers to email-update enabled their blogs, co.mments will take care of the work for you — on any blog! Ever want to get follow-up notifications on responses to comments you’ve left on someone’s blog? Or just wanted to find out about new activity on a given blog post? Well, now you can. Via email. No Tags […]
Chris Poteet
August 25th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Assaf,
When is that public URL going to be rolled out?
co.mments.com/public/
Assaf
August 25th, 2006 at 9:13 am
Chris,
Announcement coming this weekend.
Also big apology to those who received duplicate e-mails the last 24 hours. A bug with the e-mail alerts code, but it seems clear now.
mmeiser
August 26th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Cool… I see now you’ve already released the feature.
I’ll try it out over the next several days.
I can tell right away it’s better than any other option out there.
However. You may need to add more contextual information in the email. Comments can be pretty vague or reference another comment. So you need enough info in email to get reaquainted with the thread of the conversation.
Like I said… just beginning to test it out. Maybe I don’t need as much contextual information as I think i do.
mmeiser
August 28th, 2006 at 11:58 am
So far I’m digging the email ALOT.
You guys have a problem with your “contact” page and your “what is co.mments?” page. They’re BLANK! I was just talking with a friend and he asked where you were located… I got nothing for him! Blank pages.
We’re working on a microformats standard “relCite” or “CiteREL” for tracking conversations blog post to blog post. You should be able to google that pretty easy.
Basically the idea is that one day you’ll not be able to simply pull up the threaded posts and comments…. But what about all the blog posts and all the comments in a cross blog conversation.
Example below.
Blog 1… First pos
–comment 1
–comment 2
–comment 3
Blog post 2 reffering to first post
–comment 1, 2, 3, 4
–Blog post 3 refferring to first post
—-comments 1, 2, 3…
–Blog post 4 refferring to blog post 1
These posts of course would be displayed in reverse chronological order.
The context of the blogger their idenity / brand / and their comments would provide important subtext to shape the debate within their comments making it even more robust a system than something like slashdot comments and even more useful.
Imagine… you could automatically add filters (like gmail filters) to label or star particular commenters of favorite blogs.
You’d even be able to
The BIG idea here is to
a) obsolete things like yahoo groups
b) decentralize the conversation so noone ones it… there’s just dozens of middle ware trackers and search tools
c) make the conversations media rich… i.e supporting audio, video, and image in addition to text…. you might one day be able to subscribe to a thread of conversation via RSS
d) driving traffic, conversation and media rich debate throughout the blogosphere
e) trusted conversation… each agregator and conversation tracker could develop their own mechanisms… but users would be given the ability to flag or blacklist certain feeds or blogs that introduce spam into the system or that they just don’t like… affecting only themselves… but providing an example that others can follow so as to rapidly weed our crap and inversely… by favoriting to rapidly bubble up interesting threads and places for conversation.
f) This is a huge information architectural concept but we need to move the blogosphere and the web in general BEYOND search and findability and into the real of organic discovery. Such mechanisms as this will ultimately benifit EVERYONE moving traffic from a few centralized sites like google or yahoo into a much more natural and organic network where traffic and conversation flow around the edges of the network… blog to blog.
The public domain… the public spaces of the future belong to the people. They are the front porches, the back yard parties, the barbeque’s, the kitchen tables of the information universe.
As commercial spaces like Starbucks and malls have become the 3rd places or the “private public spaces” of meatspace… the trend will invert itself and personal blogs will become the home of public debate in the internet space… taking it back… not that commercial entities EVER provided it… from radio, newspaper, TV/Cable/Satelite.
From an information architecture perspective we live in a brilliant time… we live in our own sandbox… a grand paboratory of experimentation in communications and media.
Peace,
I’m just going to post this over on intermediated.com
Assaf
August 28th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Thanks for alerting me. The Wiki was down, fixed now.
rel=cite, do you mean this spec?
http://microformats.org/wiki/cite-rel
I’m still talking to Eran to figure out whether co.mments supports and what I can do better (ideas welcome). If you check out the HTML, all sources are properly cited.
I’m a big believer in distributed conversations, we just need to make the tools easier.
intermediated » Blog Archive » co.mments.com, tracking conversation in the blogosphere, a follow up
August 28th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
[…] From: co.mments.com » Blog Archive » E-Mail Alerts So far I’m digging the email ALOT. […]
Michael Meiser
August 31st, 2006 at 11:02 pm
BTW, yes that’s exactly the specification I was talking about.
http://microformats.org/wiki/cite-rel
One day we’ll be able to follow the conversation from blog post to blogpost and comment to comment across the entire blogosphere.
I see co.mments future as a tracker and aggregator of conversations.
As of yet the conversation still exists in the BBS’s the About.com’s and on in the comments of sites like NYTimes. however the blogosphere and services like co.mmments will gradually goble these old coporate hierchies up and allow the reorganization of conversation in brilliant new ways. One of which is that conversations will no longer be tied to the brand or coporation’s domain space which sponsored them. Words and comments from all over the web and hence world will intermingle in natural threads. You’ll have only to favor or filter your favorite places of discussion wether that be slashdot and metafilter, or your favorite blogs…. and filter by language… or even geography to see what people are saying near you.
Threaded conversations like tagging, and trusted models like blogging will become a major new facet aka. dimension of the internet.
Assaf
September 1st, 2006 at 12:41 am
“One day we’ll be able to follow the conversation from blog post to blogpost and comment to comment across the entire blogosphere.”
Hopefully, it will happen soon enough
Blog Email Alerts
October 27th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
If you use blogger… try http://znitch.com
they have a javascript button that users can use to subscribe to your updates AND a keyword filter too..