Participation Literacy

About text:

coComment is a service to simplify of one of the most painful and ineffective processes on the Web: blog commenting. coComment is free, and will help you keep track of the comments and conversations you and others are making on blogs. Did you ever lose track of a conversation because you lost the URL of the post you’ve commented on? Have you ever wished to be informed when someone responds to your comment, rather than frantically refreshing the page looking for a reaction to your latest comment? How much would it improve your life if you could see all our conversations in one easy and simple page? coComment will address these issues by giving you an easy and seamless way to track and follow your online comments and conversations.

coComment is a Web service for tracking comments. It works like this:

1. Write a comment in a blog article.
2. Press the coComment bookmarklet in your browser. A small logo beside the submit button shows that the comment will be added to your coComment account.
3. Press the submit button and the comment is simultaneously added to the blog article and your coComment account.

Visiting your account at coComment, you see the table in the screenshot. To the left are the blogs I have commented in, followed by the title of the article. The column in the middle points to the number of comments written on the article – after I made my comment. Three persons have commented on the TechCrunch article, after I made my comment. Comments made before I commented, are not in this list. The point is that I would see the comments that followed my own, which are possibly in dialogue with me. Commenting is about dialogue, both with the author of the article and other people commenting on the article.

Commenting is participating, one of the core values of the Web 2.0 concept. If you are integrated in a very tight blogosphere, where everyone knows each other, commenting is no problem. Your comment is noted and for every comment you write, you connect yourself tighter to your blogosphere. For example, I am a member of a Swedish photo community called Fotosidan, like Flickr. Last summer I was very active and uploaded about 150 pictures, got over 500 comments on them and commented on about 750 pictures myself. But Fotosidan is quite limited in space (the space made up by its users) and all users share a common interest, photography.

Widening our participation arena to the whole Web creates an almost fathomless space to navigate and create in. CoComment and similar systems can make this fathomless space seem more manageable. In addition our culture is about making traces. The most noticeable way of leaving traces in the author-world is still the writing of books, or if you are a journalist, writing in a well known paper or journal. Some researchers and scientists create very noticeable traces in their own community, and since a big part of the research community is international, the traces might be substantial. Now you have Bloggers and Gamers and Wikipedians and they might also leave substantial traces in certain communities.

At the bottom of the trace pyramid are the Commenters. Blogging + commenting are effective ways of leaving traces in the blogosphere. Few people are Commenters, without also being bloggers, but as an isolated phenomenon, commenting leaves scarce traces. CoComment and similar systems might raise the position of the Commenter. Now I have a home page where my mycelia of comments can be displayed to the world. The sum of the small traces might be an artwork in its own right.