CoComment goes 3.0 and adds the expert layer

Although most people are slowly getting used to the idea of Web 2.0, the third version of the web is knocking on our doors. The last couple of years, we’ve embraced the wisdom of crowds – inviting anyone to create content and guide us through the web. Yet now most of us feel it’s time to manage that overabundance of content and ask for experts to give us a hand while discovering the web. With experts I mean people who have proved to know more than average about a certain subject. Call them mavens if you want. Mahalo and Topicle are examples of services who already embraced these people, Swiss conversations online tracker coComment is about to do the same.

Matt Colebourne at The Next Web conference

For those of you who don’t know what coComment is, CEO Matt Colebourne has sent me a short summary of what they do: “The core functionality of coComment is to enable users in managing their conversations across the web. Additionally, users can utilize coComment in discovering conversations they want to participate in or people they want to follow, as we track over 17 million conversations across 280,000 sites.”

The discovering part, that’s where the experts come in. The new community features include ranking and rating of comments by user and by tag to make it easy to find specific conversations or people. “This”, says the press release, “enables the best conversations, rather than simply the most prolific, to become much more visible and accessible”. So coComment users can qualify comments based on the reputation of the commenter. Therefore, people can find the best discussions and conversation by following certain people who function as conversation leaders, simply because they add the most value to a discussion.

A nice extra for bloggers and publicists is that they can check whether visitors like the discussions about their publications. This way, coComment offers us more insight in the value of the much-discussed phenomenon of online conversations.