* coComment is an intriguing entry in the 'Service Aggregation Market'
If you find that tracking all of the blogs and forums that interest you is becoming a major headache you might want to take a look at coComment.
You tell coComment which online conversations you’re following and the service gives you the luxury of a single location that not only aggregates what you’re watching but also notifies you whenever conversations are added to.
You can publish your conversations to your blog or e-mail them to your friends. CoComment also tracks the top commentators, which articles and posts are generating the most comments, and who is commenting on the same conversations as you.
You can link coComment directly to your blog as well as your Technorati, Digg, Flickr, and Youtube accounts along with many forum systems.
CoComment currently experiences about 100 million page views per month with a population of only 100,000 signed up users! Interestingly coComment users are some of the most active on the ‘Net; coComment’s CEO, Matt Colebourne, told me that the global average of comments is about 3.5 per blog entry. Among coComment users that average rises to around 12 per blog entry.
Currently coComment is free, but once they reach around 500,000 users Matt said that they would begin to monetize the service. The basic service will remain free and not surprisingly, given the number of page views, advertising will be one of the first revenue sources. CoComment also plans to offer an ad-free service for around $5 per annum.
Much to my surprise Matt said that coComment won’t be crawling comment threads followed by users to improve contextual advertising. The company feels such a move would alienate the user base – that’s a mighty refined ethic for any company given the increased value of the alternative.
Other planned premium enhancements will include tracking other people’s comments, improved spam filtering, reputation assessment, private groups, and various value ranking services.
CoComment also offers outsourcing of commenting services for large sites. The logic here is that if your Web site includes any kind of blog or forum where your users can post then you have a tough decision to make: Do you manage user postings or not? If you don’t, and particularly if your users can post anonymously, you’ll have lots of off-topic messages diluting the good stuff along with lots of spam postings.
For small volume sites with a strong focus, editorial control can be relatively painless and risk free, but if you have a large active collection of users posting you can wind up with the editorial job from hell. Moreover, above and beyond the issues of playing nanny and potentially losing users who object to censorship there’s the issue of liability for postings: Once you take on any sort of editorial control you are also taking on legal responsibility for that content!
If you have a large volume of comments to deal with and the management prospect doesn’t thrill you, you might want to consider offloading your workload to coComment.
This is an intriguing entry in what I call the Service Aggregation Market. The focus of this market is the opportunity to simplify online user experience across multiple services, and there’s potentially a huge value associated with meeting the user need. CoComment indicates how powerful the business opportunity could be.
