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I just got back from a free coffee and conversation across the road in Union Square, here in San Francisco, with coComment, the blog comment aggregator.
The service was handing out free cappuccinos encased in coComment coffee sleeves with phrases to complete such as “If I could name my own presidential candidate it would be…”
Apart from a publicity gimmick and a backhanded compliment to Starbuck’s The Way I See It cup quotes, the idea was to send people to coComment’s site to begin conversations in its Café threads.
Just like my chat today in the real-world café is now largely confined to notebook scribbles and the participants’ vague memories of a moment in time, most of the comments made on blogs around the web are forgotten footnotes trapped inside the note that provoked them.
“The idea behind coComment is to liberate the conversations of the web,” Kristina Serafim, its head of marketing, told me.
It works by users signing up and installing a browser plug-in. Then, a copy of any comment made on any blog is sent to coComment’s servers and becomes part of the user’s page-listing of all their comments.
Their friends can see their comments and tagged comments can be assembled to become part of larger conversations on topics.
As well as empowering the comments of users, coComment also drives traffic to the sites that provoked the comments, by preserving a link to the blog post.
Bloggers who attract few comments can integrate its feature into their site or adopt coComment as their outsourced commenting platform. Launched in February last year, coComment now has more than 1m users and has tracked comments on 250,000 sites.
In a related conversation, Seesmic, the video commenting and conversation service started by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, has just acquired Twhirl.
Twhirl is a desktop client that allows users to post their thoughts to Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce, the popular microblogging and communication services, simultaneously. Seesmic plans to enable its video conversations through Twhirl and in its recursive style has already put up a video conversation about how it acquired Twhirl through Twhirl-powered Twitter conversations.
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