Lost in Conversation: no longer!

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.
~ Bruce Schneier

In the summer of 2005, I spent a week or so on an idea of mine that I planned to launch onto the web under the name 2sense. I'm glad I have abandoned this in its unfinished state, because now does this.

Although I liked my however patchy name and slogan slightly better ("2sense: making sense of your 2 cents"), their service seems to be more pronounced in terms of execution (at least from what I can tell from the outset: at the moment, it is in closed beta), and I'm looking forward to using it when it goes live.

The hype¹ carrousel rotates

Scoble that this service is going to be VERY popular with bloggers. I'm surprised, I didn't realize that back in last summer, and I was horrified by the prospect of trying to convince people of the advantages of such a service.

Dave Winer reminding us that trackbacks serve a similar purpose. However, coComment does bridge an existing gap in the read-write web conversation tracking area. There are actually two types of conversations going on. For one, blog articles referencing other articles (trackbacks, pingbacks), and secondly, people firing off shorter comments that may add value to the converstion but possibly wouldn't be worth posting to their blogs (imagine all the clicking involved for a reader trying to follow such conversation).

Tracking our comments over time will produce a very nice kaleidoscope of the conversations we participated in, and the silly as well as the profound statements we contributed to these conversations.

How does it work?

Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
~ William Safire

I didn't have the time to read up in detail how it works. The idea with 2sense was that, instead of linking to your website or blog URL you would, when commenting, link to "your" 2sense URL (i.e. 2sense.net/phil). The first time someone would click that link, 2sense would track your comment (without having to spider and scrape the blogosphere), plus you wouldn't have to notify the system manually of every comment you post. (Of course, it was planned you could set up "your" 2sense URL to forward the visitor to your website, although the default would have been to present the visitor with all your comments you posted to the blogosphere.)

It'll be interesting to see how coComment goes about tracking comments.

[1] 'Hype' does not have a negative connotation to me; and it's great they early on.

The carrousel picture was grabbed from : check out his photos, they're great.