I didn't talk about cocomment as many others did. It's generally a nice idea, but there's a lot of stuff missing to make it really useful and gaining widespread use, but they're on the right track.
But really interesting was the article in the SonntagsZeitung from last Sunday (via BloggingTom). CoComment is completely financed by Swisscom Solutions (I knew that already before..), which of course is not a bad thing, but I nevertheless wonder where the businessmodel for cocomment is. If you have to feed 12 people and a big pile of hardware, you have to make some money some day. Except you're really just a Swisscom subsidiary and they mean it as it sounds when they (swisscom, not cocomment) say:
Weblog-Anbieter will sie nicht werden, sagte die Swisscom auf Anfrage, doch der Schwung von CoComment solle ausgenĆ¼tzt werden, um mehr Ć¼ber die BedĆ¼rfnisse von Bloggern und ihrem Publikum zu lernen.
Analyzing blog comments for marketing purposes? Then you don't have to make money, of course, as the money comes from Swisscom's marketing budget :) And with those greasemonkey-like scripts, they even could analyze each blog you visit easily. I know, Google et al. do the same thing (if you install the Google Toolbar for example) and I don't say, cocomment does it already (or will ever do it), but that quote above made me thinkā¦
Maybe Swisscom just has waaay too much money and needs to get rid of it somehow and wants to be cool while doing it :) (good for us then, that hopefully gives us more cool stuff like this). Or they try to build a big community now and want to sell it to GYM (GoogleYahooMicrosoft) some dayā¦ Or they really just will go the AdSense style way and hope to make enough money this way. But for me, none of this makes really sense from a business point of view, so I still opt for the āanalyze bloggers for marketing and similar servicesā way.
This post isn't about bashing cocomment, btw. I like their idea and I'm sure the guys there are all very nice and full of even more cool ideas. I wish cocomment very much luck in the future, no matter how they are financed :)