CoComment

Along with BackType, I’ve been using CoComment for awhile to try to keep track of all the comments I leave on blogs and websites.

Unlike BackType, CoComment relies on a browser plugin to actively track every comment you post. Once you create an account at the CoComment website, you install their plugin and after that every comment you post gets sent to CoComment as well, associated with your account and with information about where it was originally posted.

It is a wonderful idea that is less useful in its actual implementation. First, it tends to be extremely unreliable — many comments I post never show up at CoComment despite using the plugin. Second, sometimes it is slow to the point where it interferes with posting a comment.

That said, as with BackType it is still better than nothing. Using CoComment, BackType, and a few other tools it is possible to start getting a nice record of all the comments you’re leaving at other websites. It’s still a whole lot harder to do than it should be, however.

BackType.Com

Lately, I’ve been trying to come up with solutions to better track the numerous comments I leave both at this site and across the Internet. At the moment there still aren’t any good solutions for this problem as a whole, but services like BackType are starting to fill the void.

BackType scrapes comments off of a number of popular websites and then lets you find your comments by linking your account to the URL you use to identify yourself at those sites. For example, I commonly use the URL for this site when making comments at other sites. So BackType lets me associate comments with that URL to my BackType account.

It’s not perfect — it seems to have a fairly small coverage limited to a small number of very popular blogs. Even then, the comments it has scraped are very recent . . . for example, it only picked up 17 of the comments I’ve left at Unpublished.net.

But, it is better than nothing, and in conjunction with similar tools out there, at least gets the ball rolling to start tracking your comments.