My blog has always been just a place for me to test whether I could put things on the Internet and a way for me to comment on things I find interesting as I surf and experiment with them. Although I’ve been blogging now for about 5 years, I’ve never added advertising to this blog to make money from it because I didn’t anticipate having much of a readership. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to have gained more readers than I would have ever thought possible. And those readers are gradually becoming accustomed to commenting here occasionally. For that, I’m grateful.
So this morning I’ve added a plug-in called Simple coComments that permits readers who are using the coComment service to do so on my blog more easily. If you haven’t yet checked out coComment, you might find it interesting. I did, and I’ve signed up to use it for a while to see whether I find it worthwhile. You don’t have to be a blogger to use it. You only need to have an interest in participating in and following the conversations that are going on. But if you are a blogger, this service has some interesting tools to offer you which you can learn more about at their site.
CoComment facilitates keeping up with the comments you have made around the blogosphere and seeing what comments others are making to the same posts that you’ve commented on. There is a Firefox extension for it, and it is compatible with services like Flickr, Digg, and a variety of blogging platforms. Since most people agree that blogging is about having conversations with readers, not just talking at them like newspaper articles have traditionally done, this plug-in makes it easier for me to track what I’ve said on other people’s blogs and to follow those conversations without having to return to the same post over and over just to see what has been said subsequent to my comment. I would also expect that having this mechanism available to me may affect my behavior of commenting, making it more likely that I’ll leave comments on other people’s blogs. That, I think, would be desirable.
As a part of the process of creating my account on coComment, I need to post this link to my Technorati Profile.