A couple of months ago I was complaining about the fact that blog comments are usually one-off fire and forget, you can’t really have a discussion (compared to forums) because usually you don’t have a way to notify users about new comments. That’s when fellow blogger kurt wismer from the anti-virus rants blog came to the rescue and told me about co.mments.com (yes, it’s a little bit hard to remember, but comments.com was already taken – presumably, and it’s still not as bad as del.icio.us)

The idea with this service is that you let them know about every blog post you commented on, and they track that page for you and notify you about new comments, either through their website, an RSS feed or e-mail. Now, to a site, you could enter the URL on their page (which is a little cumbersome, since you would have to switch back and forth between the page you commented on and co.mments.com, or install their handy bookmarklet, which, when you press it, inserts a little javascript in your browser on the current page (it works with all major browsers), which adds the current page to your co.mments.com list. Much more convenient.

If you have installed NoScript and are using it to selectively whitelist sites, please note that you need to enable scripting for the current page (at least temporarily), because the script inserted will appear to Firefox to be running from the same domain as the site, meaning that if the current site isn’t allowed to execute scripts, you can’t use this easy way to track it.

PS. Co.mments has the option – if you are a blogger – to add a special link to your posts, which – when accessed – will add the given post to the users track list – without Javascript. But this depends of course on each blog owner.