Commentino Offers a New Comments Aggregator

I think the trend is already here: comments on blog posts are getting more and more attention these days everywhere. First of all, it is visible that bloggers have started to quote comments on their own and others’ blogs quite often - using them for ideas and even quoting some commentators as sources of additional knowledge and information.

I guess the reason is quite simple here: bloggers have begun to realize that comments can serve as a vital part of the conversation taking place on their blogs. Besides, the term user-generated content can now mean everything all the users create online - including blog comments.

Another recent trend is web entrepreneurs looking for new ways for people to handle everything related to commenting on blogs and launching new startups to address different needs. This must be the reason why we see a number of startups launched to demonstrate the importance of comments in the blogosphere. We already have quite a number of various comments management plugins like Disqus or Intense Debate. We also have a comment aggregating and tracking service BackType (our review here). And today there’s a new arrival to the field - another comments aggregating product aptly named Commentino.

Basically Commentino offers a very similar thing to what BackType and coComment do by aggregating all the comments you write across the web in one page that will have a unique URL of your choice.

But the major difference from BackType is that you will need to download a special desktop application to use Commentino to publish comments - and this seems to be the largest disadvantage to me as the desktop client does not have a Mac version and also seems not to be particularly stable (though I have to admit it is a very early release for Commentino).

But the Israel-based team claims that desktop-based approach is actually an advantage as when you use the Commentino application to publish your comments everywhere, these comments are “signed” and can be considered as verified so no one will be able to claim writing on your behalf and making people believe that some embarrassing words in a comment belong to you. I myself am afraid this can be considered as an advantage only by a small group of internet celebrities who may need to protect themselves from enemies and envious people. Besides, since it is possible to choose not to aggregate any particular comment to Commentino page, it is easy to submit a comment yourself and claim someone wrote this dubious comment to defame you.

But there are some things that make the Commentino application quite an attractive tool. For example, it allows you to add tags to every comment you publish and can be used as something of a backup for everything that you write and publish online. For every website that you add a comment to you will be able to use the same tags every time you leave a comment (so that you could browse all the comments later using that tag, for example).

Where I can see this to be useful is when the blog you are commenting on does not have any plugins for you to subscribe to the subsequent comments by email yet you think your comment will lead to an answer - so you may tag such comments with “check later” or with a specific date to see if there’re new comments in a few hours or a day, for example.

But Commentino also focuses on the aspect of content discovery in addition to simply aggregating comments as it allows users to connect to other people writing on the same topics and also to discover what people write about everywhere. For that Commentino offers to search for comments or people using some text.

For now Commentino product looks like it is immature and the functionality is quite limited. But if you are looking for new ways to handle your comments around the web, Commentino could be the right thing for you, especially if you don’t want to focus on blogs only as Commentino promises they support almost all the web pages with entry fields. But the idea is nice and the more interesting tools arrive to help us manage this additional layer of user-generated content, the better, I think.