One of the great aspects of the blogosphere is the ability for people to leave comments on your blog and also comment on other people's blogs. It makes for a great continual conversation between people all over the internet (by the way I would like to say a big thank you to everybody who has left comments on this site and taken the time to get in contact ). Comments are another manifestation, along with, for example, blogs, social networks and wikis of how the internet is moving away from being a broadcast medium that people just 'surf' to being a place for to interact, communicate and share ideas. The problem has been that is difficult to keep track of these different conversations across dispersed web sites. CoComment is a system that is designed to bring these conversations together by placing a copy of the comment on their servers and providing a web site where you can see all of the conversations you are following in one place.

I found out about this system through a post on Martin Weller's blog: "I want to be a good blogger" which is worth reading in itself but also has some very informative comments where some questions were answered by one of the people involved with cocomment itself. Integrating it into Drupal (the software which powers this site) was very easy; there is a module available at: http://drupal.org/project/cocomment, simply install and enable it and you are away. Sadly, there is no sign yet of a Drupal 6 release though.

So now when you make a comment on this blog you can look in on the other comments that get posted on that item too on your cocomment account and keep up to date with what others are saying. Before all this can happen though you will need to register on CoComment and follow the instructions there on how to get going. They also helpfully provide a test blog for you to try your account out to make sure it is working.