While the Web has brought great bounty to Internet, the downside is that its client-server model has tended to eclipse the collaborative and participatory ethos of services like Usenet. The early Internet ideals were in danger of being subsumed by a Web in which users were relegated to docile, passive, paying consumers of “content” served up by media barons and their designer acolytes. But the dark vision, presented by Thomas Pynchon in his forward to an edition of George Orwell’s 1984, of an Internet transformed into a means of social control has not materialized - not yet anyway. The antidote has been user generated content, of which Graham Fisher, MD of France Telecom R&D (Uk) has been a long term advocate. A new generation of social networking applications - blogging, in particular - has nurtured vibrant participant, interactive communities. The key words here are “participant” and “interactive”. Jerry Slezak noted in post about the absence of a comment facility on Jon Udell’s Jon’s Radio, that interaction and the exchange of ideas are critical aspects of blogging. Jon acknowledged this in his blog-to-blog reponse: “Ownership of your own stuff, and federation by linking to other people’s stuff, are the twin pillars of the blogosphere”.

Which brings us to the subject of this posting: I’ve recently come across Cocomment, a neat tool that allows users to keep track of both conversations they are following and responses to comments they have made. It’s a good idea well executed. A number of people, including Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington (with some reservations) and Marshall Kirkpatrick, have already expressed enthusiasm about Cocomment. For me though, the most exciting thing is Cocomment’s potential as a component in a much wider conversational subsystem. There is clear synergy with some of the things that Calico Jack has recently been working on. Leaving aside some reservations about data location, I can see Cocomment having an important role in a new generation of dynamic social networking applications.