When I discuss the basics of personal knowledge management on the Web I usually suggest starting with a Feed Aggregator (like Bloglines) and a Social Bookmark service (like Ma.gnolia or del.icio.us). Using these two tools, you can manage the streams of information that flow by and mark items of note for future reference and sharing.
One of the more difficult aspects of reading blogs has been tracking the comments. Now there are several services available to help you with that. Basically, they act like a feed reader for specific posts and tell you if anyone has added another comment since you last looked. I started with coComment last year, but found it had a few glitches when I used the Firefox plug-in, so I abandoned it. It probably works fine now, as I get frequent visits to my site via coComment.
How do I know that I get visits from coComment? I use Blogflux’s MapStats which is a service only for blogs that shows you who has visited your site, where they come from, what search terms they’ve used, etc. Blogflux has recently introduced Commentful, which is similar to coComment and lets you track any conversation with a right mouse-click. So far I’ve found it simple and easy to track blogs where I’ve left comments.
One other comment tracking service that I’ve come across is co.mments, which appears to be simple and easy, but I haven’t tried it out.
Once you’re comfortable with an RSS feed aggregator, the next addition to your learning 2.0 toolbox should be a comment tracker.
I’ve found that co.mments is a little “prettier” and easier to use. Maybe it was that Firefox plugin issue with CoComment. With both services, I believe it was possible to get a feed of all comments to the entries I had explicitly tracked. I find this a great mechanism for seeing what new things people say on articles in which I have specific interest.
Another way to track these comments is to use an Aggregator that can read individual-article comment feeds. My aggregator (GreatNews) and a few others give you the ability to easily subscribe to the comment feed for an article.
Thanks, Jack. I’ll have to check out GreatNews.
Thanks Harold – this certainly was one of the missing parts. I shall find out about it and monitor these comments in CO.