Following conversations on the web
Posted on January 27th, 2009 in Social media | 11 Comments »
There’s been numerous times I wanted to continue to follow the comments made on specific blog posts.
If I was lucky, the blog owner had the Subscribe to comments Wordpress plugin installed. The problem is that only a small percentage of blogs actually do.
The solution?
Let BackType handle everything. BackType works across all blogs, be it Wordpress, MovableType, etc.. You simply install a bookmarklet in your browser and click on it whenever you’re on a page you want to follow.
You can then subscribe to a RSS feed that will update either in real time, once a day or once a week with the newest comments from blog posts you’re following.
Having the results returned as a RSS feed makes everything much easier to manage. The old Subscribe to comments plugin sends you a bunch of emails instead, cluttering your inbox. Secondly, everything is centralized at BackType. This ensures you can easily add or remove subscriptions in 1 place.
But that’s not the only service BackType provides
In fact, it’s core service is to track all comments across the web. These are then indexed and made searchable on their website. A wealth of knowledge is contained within.
The best part for me is being able to follow other people. For example, here is my profile. If you want to, you can follow me and from that point onwards you will see every comment I make. Very powerful. Here are some popular people.
There’s one other service; Alerts. Think Google Alerts, but for comments. Whenever the keywords you specify are in a comment, you’ll receive a notification.
Now, BackType is still a pretty young service, and if there’s one fault with BackType, it’s that their index is not complete. However, improvements are made daily. If you find your site is not yet added to the database, you can do so here.
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!


11 Responses
This sounds very cool. Looking forward to giving it a try.
This comment was originally posted on http://www.improvingtheweb.com/)“>Improving The Web
Wow! I always wanted to keep track of my comments on other blogs. So far I was either favorating the blogs or trying hard to remember. Thanks for creating a plugin. I will download and use it. I believe it works with WordPress 2.7 .
This comment was originally posted on http://www.improvingtheweb.com/)“>Improving The Web
Great. I was searching for this since a few days
This comment was originally posted on http://www.improvingtheweb.com/)“>Improving The Web
Good feature though to track your comments on other sites.I whats use in displaying them on your site.Its waste of space again right?
This comment was originally posted on http://www.improvingtheweb.com/)“>Improving The Web
Great find… I think this tool is going to be useful for me.
This comment was originally posted on http://www.improvingtheweb.com/)“>Improving The Web
Great plugin, well done on my site.
This comment was originally posted on http://www.improvingtheweb.com/)“>Improving The Web