My Comments Elsewhere
I continue to develop this blog as the central location of everything I do on the internet. I can integrate Flickr, Twitter, Delicious and so on but one thing missing are the comments I leave across the web.
Backtype is attempting to do that. It connects to a variety of services and can keep a record of comments that you have made. The services it can claim comments from currently include Digg, Disqus, Friend Feed, Gawker Media, Hacker News, Intense Debate, Live Journal, Mahalo Answers, Posterous, Reddit, Vox and Facebook.
I have accounts on a number of these services however I rarely leave comments on them. What about Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress.com or self hosted wordpress blogs?
Backtype does allow you to manually enter blogs where you comment, but does not find them. You must remember to enter them at Backtype. I found that when I entered a few blogs it pulled ALL of the comments I for the site. Not just the ones I made. Perhaps I was doing something wrong?
I am expecting Backtype to add capability and to support more websites over time so I’ve started using a Wordpress plugin to archive and display the comments i’ve made. My Comments Elsewhere is a Wordpress plugin that interfaces with BackType. It apparently works with CoComment as well but I can’t figure out how to configure that. It provides a user configurable digest mode and a widget. So far I’ve been happy with the few comments it’s displayed in the widget but haven’t tested the digest capability. This is one area where I expect a lot of growth so would easily change to other services.
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Hi,
coComment also provides a WP sidebar plugin that can display your comments elsewhere, and also your conversations (not just your comments, but also answers to your comments). From the plugin, you can also enable coComment integration on your blog and display last comments, top users and top tags. Once your blog in integrated with coComment, you can promote this feature to your commenters so they get notified as soon as a conversation is updated: they will come back to read the new comments and maybe answer.
By using coComment browser extension, all your comments will be tracked, regardless of the site. This removes the limitation of site support when trying to get the comments afterwards AND avoid having to notify a service of where you entered a comment.
Hi Greg,
Sorry we had trouble finding your comments — we do support every major blogging platform, but sometimes we haven’t added the blog you’re commenting on. In that case, we ask that our users help us add blogs @ http://www.backtype.com/addblogs. Otherwise, you don’t need to do anything for us to find your comments (providing you’ve claimed your identities properly @ http://www.backtype.com/home/claim)
Let me know if you have any questions.
I have found the service to work rather well (with the limited database of blogs that they have).
@Greg: When you claim your comments, you don’t enter the URLs of the blogs – you add your URLs (e.g. http://www.greginthedesert.net). Here’s more info: http://www.backtype.com/faq#q4
@The Plaid Cow: If there are blogs you’d like added, please submit them to http://www.backtype.com/addblogs
christophe, thanks for leaving a comment. I did sign up for CoComment and checked out the WP plugin. The thing I disliked the most was that CoComment takes over my comments system.
@Christopher, When I added blogs that I had commented on, at the top of the claimed comments page, it added all the comments from the site to my account (Not just the comments I made). How do I have it just add the comments that I made?
Don’t know if my issue is clear, but this is why I think I might have done something wrong.
This was the same reason that I avoided Disqus.
I think I understand now. I enter URLs that I would have used in the comment URL field. Backtype then can add them as my comment when it comes across one.
Don’t worry, I have been (as I find comments that don’t show up).