LostInTechnology

Keep Track of Your Valuable Comments with BackType

Posted on 31. Mar, 2009 by Aravind Jose in Internet Tools

The “Web 2.0″ is often explained as “not a technology, but a radical shift in the outlook and approach towards the internet, enhancing user interaction and engagement, thereby providing a better platform for people to express/make use of.”

Blogs are a phenomenon, so are comments. Once comments were introduced and implemented, you got the chance to talk on anything and everything. Comments enhances the parent post, adding more value to it. Also, commenting is a very good social action.

Why Keep Track Of Your Comments?

Chances are high, that you are a good commenter (or commentator?!). So, you keep talk and engage in debates/discussions on various blogs, all around the Internet. Now, isn’t it great (if not necessary), to have all your shared knowledge consolidated? Yes, of course it is.

It improves your authority and helps you to keep track of yourself. Also, more and more people are starting to contribute to the discussion as seen by the current level of user-generated-content. Wouldn’t it be nice to keep track of what you created?  Here’s how to do just that.

BackType: The Swiss Army Knife of Comments

Keeping track of comments has been around, but it wasn’t until the launch of BackType that you could do it easily and effectively. The talented guys there, built a powerful system, that’s capable of providing a home for all of your comments made around the web. Upon creating an account, you are asked to give the e-mail you use while commenting.

Then, BackType will search to find all the comments you’ve made and will present it to you for approval. You get a profile there, that houses all your approved comments. You can share them with fellow members and can follow other people, if you’re interested in the comments they make.

BackType now supports a variety of platforms. The good thing is, that they’re adding more and more platforms frequently.  Clearly, this adds a new dimension to the social web. A very powerful one, indeed.

Tapping the True Power of BackType

Now that we’ve seen how useful it is to keep track of your comments, let’s dig deeper to find the best tools to use with BackType.  These tools come directly from the guys at BackType: BackType Connect and BackTweets.

BackType Connect

BackType Connect shows you all of the conversation surrounding a post or article. Enter the URL to the post/page, and you get results showing references to that particular post from all over the web. There’s a handy bookmarklet available, so as to provide you with quick access to conversations based on the page you are at.

BackTweets

The power of Twitter is now unquestionable. It’s almost sure that Twitter search will replace the traditional search as the latter isn’t capable of providing real time results. In this respect, BackTweets are great. It’s basically an extension to BackType Connect and shows you all tweets referencing a particular URL.

Subscriptions and Alerts

Another important feature is Subscriptions, which could be described as Google Alerts for specific posts. BackType Subscriptions sends you e-mail updates whenever someone comments on a post you specify. You receive updates as they happen or in daily or weekly digests. You can also monitor your subscriptions via RSS with your favorite feed reader. Sweet, huh?!

Yet again, there are Alerts. BackType Alerts sends you e-mail updates whenever a search term is mentioned in a comment. And it seems, BackType  is the only tool that will find mentions in comments.

Display, Share or Show Off Your Comments

With the My Comments Elsewhere plugin, you can display your comments on your WordPress powered site/blog. This plugin, makes use of BackType.

What do you think about BackType making comments much more powerful?

Aravind Jose T. (@AravindJose) is a web & media enthusiast and a volunteer for positivity. Loves sense, logic, clarity, simplicity and logic and is open for conversations.

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Tags: backtype, comments, reviews, web apps, web tool