Commentosphere: comments folksonomy
BlogFresh has the freshest stuff around of late, the latest is on Commentosphere, basically a place to collate all the comments you make in the blogosphere…more here.
As you can see this is a folksonomy for comments…all made with the power of Ning, great stuff!
Personally I just tag all the comments I make in a del.icio.us account under the tag “mycomments”, I also re-syndicate this to the sidebar of my blog.
Even if you don’t have a blog, this is a great way to collate all your blog interactions, you could also re-syndicate (RSS-to-HTML via Feed Digest) into a blog (see this example), or even easier into a tool like SuprGlu (although this is more designed to present re-mix feeds)…so you could have a blog after all but the posts are actually comments you make around the place, this type of information is as handy as a blogroll, it tells you a lot about the interests of a user and people they connect to.
The only thing about using del.icio.us is that there are no permalinks, so you can’t point people to a comment you have bookmarked, that’s why re-syndicating to a blog helps, but other folksonomies have permalinks, such as Clipmarks, this tool is perfect as you can just highlight your comment and paste it into an entry in your Clipmarks account, use the whole account for comments, or keep these entries in a folder, or a tag.
Actually Clipmarks automatically keeps track of all the comments you make within the Clipmarks folksonomy as well as comments made to you, so this concept is just broadening this to the whole web.
Anyway back to Commentosphere, for a starters it lets you import bookmarks from del.icio.us.
Every entry has:
- tag/s,
- who made the comment
- the post the comment was made on
- the permalink of the comment on the post the comment was made (although not all blogs have permalinks for every comment, or I think this is the URL of the parent comment)
From the developers blog post:
“Comments are semi-threaded on Commentosphere. It works like this: when adding a comment you can specify the permalink URLs of one or more comments that this comment is a reply to. When viewing that comment in the app these ‘parent’ comments are listed and linked to. A link to ‘child’ comments is presented and, if clicked, will bring up a page of all comments who have that comment set as their parent. Multiple parents is currently a tag buggy, but that should be fixed soon.”
- the blog home page the comment was made on
- the date
- a view button (this is your permalink in your commentosphere account)
- description so you can remember the essence of the comment without having to launch to it.
As usual there is a user and tag cloud, a bookmarklet, and some great URL filtering capabilities….so you can see comments for a tag, user, a blog URL, post URL (this is a direct way to see others who have left a comment on the same post you have), and more.
Since every page, search has an RSS feed you can also follow the latest in your RSS reader.
There is even a built in inbox or aggregator, where you can track users, blogs, posts, tag/s, add from RSS (I think this means you can enter an RSS feed generated from within Commentosphere (this way you can track search feeds or tags at the user level, etc…(not sure if this is correct as it kept timing out), here’s the explanation:
“For off-Commentosphere comments you have the option of adding an RSS comments feed that will also have its content mixed into the page. The page may itself be syndicated via RSS to allow you to monitor comments from blogs across the web without cluttering your reader with all the innumerable feeds”
Also has the RSS-to-Java trick to showcase an RSS feed from the Commentosphere onto your blog sidebar, note this has amazing choices of re-syndication, you can re-syndicate even a search string, and combine it with all the other optional fields.
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The URL field for Commentosphere is indeed the permalink to the comment on a blog. Most blogs do provide this (blogger and wordpress certainly do) and for those that don’t you can just use the url to all comments on a post (usually #comments).
The purpose of the internal aggregator (although it is still at tad buggy at this point) is to be able to follow comments from wherever you want all in one page / feed. I find my feedreader gets overcrowded with comments feeds, this would combine those into one. Adding feeds generated from within the app would work, but is (moslty) unneccesary, since you can add internal sources (blog, post, user, tag) as well as the external rss sources.
Comment by Stephen Paul Weber — December 7, 2005 @ 9:36 am