The Next Web

Commentag.com: Sort discussions on blogs

Written on May 6, 2008 – 3:10 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

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.

I hope you like that post!

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Arnaud Coomans, brussels, Commentag, comments, london, Olaf Witkowski, tag, tagcloud, Xavier Damman

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