Backtype: tracking my comments on the web
Posted January 20, 2010 – 11:48 pm
From time to time, I write comments on the tech blogs and elsewhere. Obviously, they are deeply insightful and saturated with wisdom, so it only makes sense to want to keep track of them all.
Comment tracking & aggregation
But how? The answer: Backtype, a free comments tracking service. Backtype describes itself as a “real-time, conversational search engine” because as a result of tracking people’s comments across the web, it also includes features that allow you to search web comments in a way that you can’t with Google. I don’t have too much interest in the searching function, so the value-added function for me is having Backtype track and catalog my comments on the web.
Backtype works by scouring the web, indexing all the comments people make on blog posts. It doesn’t spider every single blog, but covers all the major ones and lots of not so major ones, too. It also seems to index blogs of any size that reside on the major hosted blogging platforms – e.g., WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Posterous, etc. That’s why the comments on my tiny, tiny personal blog, John’s Bytes, are getting indexed.
Once you register and identify yourself, it keeps track of your comments on a personal webpage – here’s a link to my web comments. It does this on a continuously as it tirelessly scours the blogs. New comments are posted to your Backtype page on reasonably timely basis – usually within 24 hours, often much faster.
Backtype seems to identify your comments by tracking against the URL you enter when you leave a comment. It is not clear to me whether that domain name has to be unique to you or can be something that multiple people might use. In other words, using my own domains (like this one – www.WebBizGeek.com) works fine, but what if you worked at Fidelity or some other company and didn’t have your own URL? I’m not sure how that works. Perhaps by tracking against both a URL and your ID / username, it works out.
If you aren’t entering a URL when you make a comment (for instance, in many forums), then Backtype seems not to have a way to trace comments back to you. That means that a lot of comments I make – e.g., in the forums on drupal.org, openx.org – aren’t tracked. That’s sort of a disappointment, but perhaps they will eventually figure out how to track those, too.
Backtype is similar to another service called CoComment. Both are widely used. I’ve not tried CoComment, so can’t say which is better. Maybe I’ll give it a shot as some point just to see.
As an added bonus, today I was able to integrate my Backtype comment stream directly into my blog here: my Backtype comment stream. I did so using a WordPress plugin called My Comments Elsewhere. Installation was quick and straightforward. The plugin supports both Backtype and CoComment. You need to have an account with one of the other since it relies on those services for the actual comment aggregation.
If you want to keep track of your comments, too, I recommend you give Backtype a try.
