Alex wrote me an email while I was off at hockey—yep, another defeat of those pesky Beavers; thanks for the four points, bitches!—to let me know about Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch entry on CoComment, which seeks to help uses with the problem of tracking their Weblog comments.

To use CoComment, a user must install a bookmarklet on their browser and use that bookmarklet, instead of the blog interface, to leave a comment. Users then have a centralized place where all comments are located, and can push that content onto their own blogs with a widget. Commenters are also notified as the conversation continues, so they do not have to continue to go back to the original post. See the “learn more” area of CoComment for more information on this.

I’m with Arrington on being skeptical. He writes:

I may disagree on this one. The idea is great, but I don’t want to have to use a third party service to actually leave the comment. Also, the service does not centralize my trackback comments (comments I choose to leave by posting on my own blog). And I wonder how well it will actually work across all of the various blog platforms.

That says nothing about how this could easily be an unwitting Trojan horse for spammers: just as soon as we get used to trusting CoComment users to be human, they’ll be bots, spreading their spammy-spammy bits. Heck, they might even use CoComment to track their success rate! Before you say that this won’t happen, that CoComment will do everything in their power to stop this, I gotta say: “Yeah, right. They can try, but they won’t succeed. Even with automatic barriers, real spam still slips through, and that requires manual attention. That requires man-in-the-loop, and that gets expensive … fast.”

It’s an admirable effort; I certainly believe that there’s a problem with personal comment aggregation. I believe that I’ll stick with my use of del.icio.us for the task of personal comment aggregation—with my regular del.icio.us linkdumping, all that stuff ends up here anyway.