Artiklz Integrates Your Blogging Conversations Deeper Into Your Browser

Have you ever been in an awkward situation when you write a comment on a blog post in reply to some commenter and your comment was intended as a question or suggested some reaction from the person you addressed it to - but the reaction never arrived? I have certainly been in such situations pretty often myself and there were cases when I was offended by the person never replying to my comment - until I realized that this person could simply be unaware of my comment existence.

I’m afraid that I myself have offended some people after leaving comments on blogs they replied to but never heard back from me - simply because I never checked back. And I have to admit that I am way too lazy to track all the conversations properly and the only conversational tool that I actually track is FriendFeed - mainly due to the fact that my Twhirl desktop application is constantly running and will always notify me when there’s something that needs my attention.

This is why I am rather happy to see today’s announcement from Artiklz, a startup intended to aggregate all the social media activity around the content you create as a blogger and to track everything you are interested in people say - no matter where they say it. First of all, Artiklz brings all the comments to one place, just below a post the comments refer to, - even if these comments are left on FriendFeed or on popular social voting or social bookmarking services like Digg or Reddit.

Besides, Artiklz has the functionality called “Conversation Search” which allows a user to keep track of all the mentions of a particular term this user is interested in. In this part of the product Artiklz also competes with BackType that also aggregates all comments from all users - both on blogs and on social voting sites - and puts them to special aggregation pages for every user.

We reviewed Artiklz at the time of their launch and I am glad that the team has been working on adding certain desktop functionality that will ensure further engagement of people with the comments, no matter where the comments are - on blog posts or on this post submitted to Digg or Reddit. And as a person only working on one notebook everywhere I myself prefer to have at least some tools that run on my desktop and make it easier for me to use the web-based tools as well.

Today Artiklz introduces new tools to keep people more involved in the discussions they participate in and help them track the conversations better. First of all, the new feature launched today by Artklz is a toolbar intended to access Artiklz right in a browser without leaving to another browser tab. This toolbar will let users access and edit their profiles as well as manage the items they track (be it people, blogs or individual posts on a blog).

Another tool also launched today is a special browser bookmarklet for you to quickly choose what conversations you are particularly interested in - and never forget about them in the future. For example, when you land on a blog post that you are very much interested in, everything it takes is clicking the bookmarklet in your browser and Artiklz will know you are interested in conversations around this particular post - so you could easily get email notifications when new comments from other people are posted. At that you can also choose how frequently you want to be notified of new comments so that you can choose if you want to know a comment is posted immediately as it is posted or if you would simply prefer Artiklz to send you all the comments submitted during a day.

You will be able to install both the toolbar and the bookmarklet here and keep in mind that you can even use the bookmarklet without having an account with Artiklz - it will keep the conversations you are interested in right in your email inbox and you will be able to start tracking new conversations right from your browser. This is certainly the tool I already see myself using a lot as I often have to subscribe to RSS feeds for comments on the blog posts I am particularly interested in but I really prefer to get such notifications by email - and this is where Artiklz bookmarklet will help me a lot, especially when I want to see the comments as quickly as they are posted.

Another new thing added by Artiklz today is a web interface for notifications. While I personally prefer to be notified of new comments that are relevant to me by email - they are simply all sorted out to a special folder - I know there are people who may very well be irritated by the number of comments that will land in their inboxes and for them Artiklz introduced a purely web-based notifications interface that will only push your conversations at your face when you are ready to consume them.

I rarely review the service and actually start using it but Artiklz bookmarklet is already safely located in my browser and I now know that I will never miss a comment I don’t want to miss, especially on some of my favorite blogs that prefer to go without the email notifications for new comments. Finally something solving a huge problem for me and combined with other aspects of Artiklz it certainly makes it a very comprehensive solution for comments management.

Full disclosure: Artiklz is the very first startup that has managed to send me a corporate t-shirt and have it delivered after a few startups offered but decided against it after learning I am located in the middle of Siberia - so I may be a little biased about their service but not enough to start using the tool I don’t actually want to use.