The official coComment weblog

What is the Blog World Expo? Blog World is where online influencers, leaders and innovators are looking to show and talk about their products directly engaging with the blogophere itself. Thanks to everyone who stopped by the coComment booth at Blog World this past weekend in Las Vegas.  We had a great time being there and having the opportunity to meet you all. Since I was not there this year I look forward to seeing you next time =)

Here are a couple photos of our booth from the event.

The competition is fierce on the contest site.  It is not to late to submit your video/text entry or cast your vote. Visit contest.cocomment.com and if you have any questions or need some help feel free to ping me at giannii@cocomment.com.

Currently here are the leaders but keep in mind it can change at any minute.

For most active commenter!

Spicy

For most rated! The people really like this video. Just happens to be a rick roll ha

For most creative!

Today we’re excited to launch coComment 3.0, a major new version that makes it easier, faster, and more fun for you to track conversations on any site or blog. We’re also teaming up with retaggr.com to extend and enhance coComment user profiles.

Being the the first and largest comment tracking and powering engine, coComment continues its commitment to serve the needs of our users and enhance the coComment experience. It is also the first and most popular comment tracking service that allows users to track conversations across any site, independent of coComment’s integration with the site – from blogs and newspapers to social networks. We’re now tracking over 22 million conversations from more than 280,000 sites , with more being added every day!

We look forward to getting your feedback on coComment v3.0, which makes it even easier for you to do what you enjoy most – share opinions, debate ideas, and monitor conversation across the web. Highlights of the new coComment version include:

A new and improved design! We wanted to make it easier for users to discover conversations, find new commenters and what’s hot in online conversations. The new design prominently features rankings in popular categories including groups, sites, tags, and more.

Simple Integration! We made the comment powering and integration process much faster and easier to use. We want the process to be as hassle free and robust as possible.

Navigation and Tools! We simplified the navigation to make key features easily available such as My coComment where all your conversations are and Discover to find new conversations and coCommenters.

We also updated the sidebar is a tool that allows users to comment and navigate around the conversations on sites at the same time.

We also have a new partnership with an exciting company called Retaggr.

Retaggr offers coComment users the ability to create a single, always-updated, interactive business card linked to their coComment conversations and their activity on a wide range of social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and other popular services.

We encourage you to check out coComment v3.0 and please keep the feedback and ideas coming! The coComment Team

Fellow coCommenters,

Want to tell you about our next coComment Challenge, which is starting today! If you have dealt with temper tantrums, sulky teenagers, and dirty diapers, you want to participate in this one and coComment would love to hear your trials and tribulations about raising children.

Visit the following blogs as they will post daily topics and by posting comments have a chance to win cash or prizes equivalent to $150 within our 30-day Challenge:

www.rolemommy.com
www.mainstreetdiaries.blogspot.com
www.mombloggersclub.com
www.mommytrackd.com
www.therojopelo.blogspot.com

Winners will be chosen in each of the following categories:

(1) Best Advice
(2) Most Popular Discussion
(3) Most frequent commenter
(4) Commenter that spurs most discussions
(5) First to comment

It’s exciting day for coComment as our new Community Manager, Giannii, joins us today! Giannii has long history of building communities and products in the social media space. Some of you may know him from Twitter, Facebook, and Seesmic. You’ll be hearing from him a lot in the future. In the meantime, drop him a line at giannii@cocomment.com to welcome him or contact him with any questions you may have!

coComment started, as a company, in January 2007. coComment, the concept, is significantly older having first seen the light of day as a proof of concept demo at the Lift 06 conference.

In that time, we have transformed what was a concept into a company with a very different (and much larger) product set, built a team of 22 people and acquired over 1.15million users.

However, in all that time, we’ve not made a cent/penny/grivna in revenues nor have we sought to do so. The funding from coComment has come solely from its investors.

For us, 2008 is a critical year. It is the time when we need to go from ‘promising startup’ to ‘viable business’ and a key part of that is starting to generate revenues. We want to do so in a manner that does not alienate our users nor distract them from what they want to do with coComment.

We have therefore started running advertising on the site, in our feeds to others sites and in coComment windows. I know, of course, that most people would prefer to see advertising-free services but the reality is, of course, that ultimately we cannot provide the service to you without generating revenues.

I also want us to offer our users the opportunity to have an ad-free service for an annual fee of $5.

I’ve seen some comments on other blogs … but not many. I therefore wanted to raise the issue here so that everyone has an opportunity to respond and let us know what they think. We’re all in favour of conversations so we’re happy to start one about this and get your views.

Best regards,

Matt.

coComment is sponsoring the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam next week (April 3-4), where coComment CEO, Matt Colebourne, will present coComment on stage and at our booth.

Next Web is THE European conference for industry thought-leaders, leading web-companies, innovative Startups, visionaries and real Web savvies. If you are at the conference or in town, be sure to stop by and check out the latest updates on coComment. We just launched V2.4 and there’s a lot more coming!

Yesterday I was speaking at the CES/Digital Hollywood panel “The Next Generation in Mobile & Broadband Platforms: Social Networks, Widgets, Search, Information, Advertising and Personalization”. We shared the room with an exciting group of speakers and a dynamic audience. It was an interesting discussion covering a range of topics. We talked about widgets on Facebook and social media and shared best marketing & advertising practices in todays’ digital world, which is highly influenced by UGC (Used Generated Content), with comments/conversations being an important part of it.

It was really great to hear from many of you that came up after the panel to tell us that coComment is solving a real need in the marketplace. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our service, so please keep the feedback coming. We look forward to connecting with you soon for integration partnerships and to tell you more about coComment.

Another event that was the highlight of CES for us was the CES “It Won’t Stay in Vegas Blogger Party†hosted by the Parnassus Group. It was fun to meet new bloggers as well as connect with some of the old-timers, like Robet Scoble, Brian Solis, Sarah Meyers, and Tom Foremsky. Some of the new bloggers we met were interestingly enough from corporate-driven blogs, like Disney Imagineering, which is doing some really cool things to interact with their consumers via a series of blogs around their brands.

The party venue was also very interesting one (The Atomic Testing Research Institute), with many unusual and fun toys (for geeks like ourselves), so we picked up some “Space Ice Cream” and an Einstein video … not exactly what one would expect from Vegas, but it made us happy

Thanks you all that stopped by at the party and the panel and we look forward to seeing you next at the AlwaysOn Media conference in NYC on January 28-30th, 2008.

Kristina Serafim & The coComment Team

From all of us at coComment, we want to wish you Happy Holidays. Thank you for this wonderful year and all the best in 2008!

Yes ! We did it !

coComment Version 2.0 won a DEMOGod award at DEMOfall 07. To say that we were ‘happy’ is to seriously underestimate the situation.

Getting Version 2.0 launched has been a long and difficult road for all of us. However, it makes the success when we do get there so much sweeter. I genuinely believe that as a result of all the honest feedback we’ve received from our users we have produced a much stronger product. So, a big big thank you to all of you for taking the time to let us know, for being honest yet supportive and for sticking with us even when we faltered.

I would also very much like to thank (sorry, this is starting to sound like an Oscar’s acceptance isn’t it) our development team. As is always the way, the business and executive people attend the events, stand up and speak and receive the plaudits. The reality is that the majority of the real work is done in our development office so the award is destined for the wall there.

But, as ever, the journey continues. coComment Version 2.0 is not a perfect product, it can get better and, with your support and feedback, it will.

Thanks,

Matt.

PS. Here we are looking suitably smug