Tracking blog comments has been a challeng for me, as I'm sure it is for many of you as well. For the most part, I've never found a consistent way to monitor comments on blog without having to go back to them several times throughout the day. Some blogs create an RSS feed that you can add to your feed reader, which is nice if you keep your feed reader open all day (i don't). Others have an option that allow you to be emailed whenever a new comment is added, but only after you post a comment yourself. Neither is an all-inclusive solution.

Admittedly, I don't comment on other blogs much, or at least not near as much as I would like to, so manually tracking comments isn't all that difficult. But for those that are actively engaged in many conversations each day, tracking comments can be rough. A few weeks ago one of my employees ran across co.mments.com, a free, web based comment tracking tool. It's turned out to be a very nice one-size fits all solution to keeping up with any comments on any blog post, whether you've commented there or not.

It's a very simple to use and you don't even need an account, (though if you delete your computer's cookies frequently you'll want to!). You simply add the URL of the post you want to track, click the "track" button and you're all set. Co.mments.com will then allow you to view all the comments that have been made up to that point through a slick AJAX interface. You're free to clear these out these past comments so you'll know when any new comments are added. If you have a user account then co.mments will email you whenever it checks for and finds new comments for any posts you're tracking.

They also have a cool bookmarklet that allows you to track comments on posts with a single click, rather than copying and pasting the URL into your co.mments web page.

A couple of other nice features: Your co.mments page tells you when you added a post to track, how many comments there are in total, how many are new and when the last comment was found. Once the comments on any post go silent, you can go back to your co.mments page and remove that post from your list and be done with it.

Co.mments can be a great time-save for anybody who frequents blogs and likes to keep up with the conversation without having to check back frequently. After a couple week trial run, I find that it's just automatic for me to track co.mments for any blog that I frequent.