Like to comment a lot? Ok, then find your last 20 comments and the replies they received. Tough job, right? You can't remember the last 20 websites you visited, let alone the last 20 you've commented on. Never fear, though: there are ways to keep track of your comments online. Maybe one day you can collect all those comments and write a book. (Not a great book, admittedly, but anything is better than Paris Hilton's Prison Diary.)
Co.mments offers a very simple way to selectively track conversations on blogs. Register and drag a bookmarklet to your toolbar; open up a page with a conversation you want to track, and simply click on the bookmarklet. The conversation will be recorded for you on the co.mments page. You can subscribe to your conversation via an RSS feed, and if you want to track them on the co.mments site, you might want to learn a couple of keyboard shortcuts which will make your life much easier. Co.mments also offers a code snippet which you can put on your blog: it makes it easy to your visitors to track the conversations there.
CoComment offers several installation options: you can either use a simple bookmarklet, or a Firefox extension, which brings the benefits of some advanced features. The extension will bring a new button to your toolbar: click it when you're on a comment page, and you'll be presented with a window which enables you to add the page to your tracking list. Of course, to be able to access your comments, you need to register at the site.
The actual tracking list is quite advanced: it allows you to filter conversations based on several criteria. You can even blacklist certain sites, or claim your blog through Technorati and then edit posts and comments through CoComment. Finally, you can monitor your community: the people commenting in the same places as you, posting replies to your comments, or the people you've added as your favorites. All in all, CoComment offers a very complete package for comment tracking, and we highly recommend it.
Commentful works similar to CoComment - you can also choose between a simple bookmarklet or a Firefox extension, or you can add pages you're commenting on to the watchlist manually. The extension will enable you to add pages with comments to your watchlist via a new item in your rightclick menu. The watchlist doesn't have as many features as CoComment, but it's presented in a very aesthetically pleasing list. It's also possible to receive notifications of new comments via RSS.
*notice: during our review Commentful was annoyingly slow; we believe that this is a temporary issue and that we were just unlucky, but it's something to have in mind.
For all you heavy Diggers, this neat app will come as a godsend. It enables you to track your comments on Digg, your friends' comments, and comments on stories posted from a certain domain. No registration is needed, just enter your Digg user name and fire away. For each comment you get the user name of the commenter, as well as the number of positive and negative votes the comment got. Just bear in mind that tracking a huge amount of comments from your friends might take a while.
