A big problem I always had was following conversations in other people’s blogs. Some blog types provide RSS for comments, but that’s not enough.

I noticed some services have emerged allowing you to easily follow conversations in blogs:

co.mments.com provides a bookmarklet, which you click whenever you are on a blog post which you’d like to follow. Then you can track all these conversations from one place. Even better, it provides a single RSS feed where all new comments from all conversations you track appear. The downside is that since co.mments has to crawl all these blogs, it is somewhat slow (new comments appear 4-5 hours after being posted). Also this may get out of hand as more and more people start using the service.

cocomment.com also provides a bookmarklet, but you can only click it before posting a comment. This means cocomment only follows conversations where you have posted at least one comment (not always the case). Moreover it only tracks messages by other people that use cocomment. Obviously this is not very helpful at the moment, as most people on most blogs don’t use cocomment.

I am using co.mments at the moment, as it does exactly what I need. Of course it’s not good for real-time conversations, but overall I like it a lot.