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Tracking blog conversations

The technology is a powerful personal publishing medium and is fast gaining acceptance

THIS WEEK NetSpeak introduces the concept of blog conversations and profiles a few services developed for tracking them.

This column discussed about blogs five years ago (http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2001/03/29/stories/082900 01.htm), when it was quite uncommon. Since then blogging technology has evolved quite a bit and as regular readers of this column would recall, NetSpeak has devoted several past issues, profiling various blog related developments.

From being just an on-line diary tool, used mainly by tech savvy netizens, the blog technology has become a powerful personal publishing medium and is fast gaining acceptance among all categories of netizens. The passionate outrage of the mainstream media against the recent ban of certain blogging services by the Union Government, attests to this observation.

`Comments' feature

An interesting aspect of a blog is its potential to generate active conversations through the `Comments' feature. Besides helping a blogger disseminate her ideas with blog entries, the blog's `Comments' feature provides her an opportunity to engage in an active conversation with the readers.

In fact, in many popular blogs the `Comments' section present far richer content, when compared to the original entry. If you go through the 'Comments' section of famous technology blogs such as Slashdot and Digg, you will realise it.

Of course, all the comments relating to a blog entry will not appear in a single day — it is a continuous flow, lasting a few days. However, going back to the blog entry time and again to read the latest comments is impractical, especially when one visits several blogs daily.

As such, we need tools for accomplishing this task automatically. This requirement inspired many web enthusiasts and led to the generation of a crop of services called comment trackers. A few such services are detailed here.

`Comment' tracking tool

Co.mments (http://co.mments.com/) is an effective comment-tracking tool tried out by this author. Once you take an account with the service, you can start tracking the comments being posted under your favourite blog entry by pasting its link on to the relevant input box. You can monitor new comments for all the entries being tracked through the `Track' page or with a webfeed reader by subscribing to your comment tracking account's web feed.

CoComments (http://www. cocomment.com/) is another feature-packed comment monitoring service available in the blogosphere. Apart from indicating all the tracked conversations together on a single web page, CoComments features a Firefox extension meant for following-up blog conversations directly from the browser. Yet another service worth the mention is Commentful (http://commentful.com/), which also offers a Firefox extension for monitoring conversations without leaving your browser. When a new comment appears in the thread being tracked, Commentful's icon attached to the Firefox browser changes its colour to green.

Yet another development in the blog comment's arena is the audio comment system of MyChingo (http://www.mychingo.com/). This service enables you to collect audio comments along with text comments from your blog's or site's visitors.

Resume hosting service

Of late many desktop applications are available on the Net also. On-line resume creation and hosting is one such segment gaining popularity among netizens. In the current globalised atmosphere we witness an explosion of job opportunities. Sticking to one type of job throughout one's lifetime is a thing of the past. People develop multiple skills and take up a variety of jobs/assignments. Hence, one needs to keep not just one resume but multiple ones tailored to different requirements. On-line resources like Resume-Resource (http://www.resume-resource.com/) feature lots of tips related to resume writing. Given this context, the on-line resume building/hosting service Emurse (emurse.com/) becomes significant.

Emurse, the free on-line service, helps you create/host several resumes with your browser. The service provides tools for adding different sections such as personal information, education, work experience and the like to your resume. Sections can be re-arranged in any manner you choose. If you wish to share a resume with the world, Emurse lets you publish it as a web page. The service offers a free domain of the form http://your-name.emurse.com.

A resume published this way is most likely to be picked up by search engines and thereby helps potential employers find it on-line. Apart from viewing the resume through the web page, the service allows anyone on the Web to download your resume in formats such as PDF, Word and Text. If you do not want the whole world to view your resume page, you can password protect it. Another feature worth a mention is the facility to view the complete statistics of your resume page (like how many times it has been viewed).

Free telephone calls

The free Net telephony program Gizmo now allows you to call your friends/clients on their land/mobile phones from your desktop. If you dial to any of the 60 countries listed on Gizmo's site (http://www.gizmoproject.com/learnmore-allcallsfree.html), the service is available for free. Unfortunately, India is not included in the free list. Nonetheless, when you register with the Gizmo, you will automatically receive $ 0.25 worth CallOut credits, which can be used to test the service.

On-line spell check

Looking for an on-line spell checker? If so, visit the service `Orangoo' (http://orangoo.com/spell/). To check the spelling, paste the text on to the input box and click on `Spell Check' button.

J. MURALI

He can be contacted at: jmurali@gmail.com

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