Commentag.com: Sort discussions on blogs
Written on 6th May 2008
12 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
We have just installed a new WordPress plug-in that allows readers to tag their own comments. The tags are hosted on the Commentag.com server and do not interfere with your search ranking or existing comment infrastructure. It is simply an add on with some functionality to make it easier to sort through comments. Although the company has launched in early April they haven’t done any marketing until now.
The service was started by three friends; Xavier Damman (24), Arnaud Coomans (25) and Olaf Witkowski (24). Two of them live in London and one works from Belgium.
From the Commentag blog: “The idea came to my mind with a blog I created about 4×4. It fostered many comments and a journalist who wanted to know the most common arguments (either for or against SUV). Unable to provide a quick answer, we imagined a system which could deal with that particular issue.”
So they came up with a simple tool to Tag comments and a Tag cloud to quickly navigate comments. So now, when you think a post sucks you can leave a comment and tag your comment: ‘Sucks’. The next commenter will be presented with a suggestionbox for tags and one of them will be ‘Sucks’. He can then choose to include the ‘Sucks’ tag in his comment too. Or maybe he will use ‘Brilliant’.
Someone reading the post and wanting to find out how many negative comments there are can then click the ‘Sucks’ tag in the tagcloud and all comments that aren’t tagged ‘Sucks’ will be hidden. Then you can deselect the ‘Sucks’ tag and highlight all the posts tagged ‘Brilliant’.
For blogs that receive dozens of comments on each post this will be a great way to add some sense to their comments section. Being able to quickly look at all positive VS negative posts could be a great tool for reader and possibly stimulate them to comment even more.
We will be testing the Commentag plug-in here and look forward to getting a lot of tagged comments on this post.
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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on May 6, 2008
As you can see I tagged this comment with a bunch of tags that you will be able to use. Give it a try!
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By AC on May 6, 2008
This plugin is great. I’m sure it will improve this blog by making discussions more readable.
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By w00t on May 6, 2008
dit zuigt apenballen
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By Menno on May 6, 2008
You should tweak the layout of the comments a bit now I guess. Maybe leave out the ‘One reponse on etc.’-block. Also the tagblock lays over the submitbutton. So you’ll have to click somewhere else first to submit your comment.
The rest seems to work nicely.
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By AC on May 6, 2008
@boris: let’s add some other tags like
great, must-have, genious, extraordinary, fabulous, the best plugin of the world
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By Nuno Teixeira on May 6, 2008
Wowzers! Very cool indeed! I’ll be adding it to one of my websites for sure that revolves around discussion. I love it. Congratulate your friends for me!
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By Xavier Damman on May 6, 2008
Thank you for your post Boris!
We are thrilled by the feedback we have and we are working on great new features:
- Multi platforms (blogger, typepad, …)
- Semantic tag (ie. auto proposing tag based on the text of your comment; you can already give it a try on http://demo.commentag.com !)
- Live tagcloud to embed on your blog to show most popular tags among all discussions of your blog.
I’ll keep you updated!
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By Xavier Damman on May 6, 2008
Forgot to mention that coupling commentag with seesmic is really neat!
Indeed, if you can’t easily scan through a long discussion with text comments, you can’t do it at all with video comments (unless you play them all which is boring and time consuming).
So tagging video comments makes a lot of sense!
We installed both Wordpress plugin (commentag+seesmic) here:
http://tinyurl.com/4vgqkf
Give it a try and make a video comment to give us your feedback!
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By Olaf on May 6, 2008
Good move on installing our plugin Boris… Nice to see that people believe in our technology !
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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on May 6, 2008
Good to see all the comments here!
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By Razmac on May 7, 2008
At first I did not like this new feature, however after testing your tags above – I can definately see the benefit.
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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on May 7, 2008
It is true that the tags-preview window hovers over the submit button. That isn’t very convenient at all…
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