Google have just launched a Firefox extension (called Blogger Web Comments for Firefox) that allows websurfers to view what people are wrlting about those pages on their blogs.
It is based on two other Google products, Blogger and Blog Search.
When you surf to a page which people have blogged about the comments/posts others have made on their blogs come up in a window in the bottom right hand corner of Firefox.
Here’s how it looks on ProBlogger where there is currently 1 ‘of many’ comments.
You can also hit the little arrow in the top right of the popup window to show more comments and make it look like this:
If I click on the ‘make money online’ link it takes me to the blog post where the comment was made (is that a splog?).
If I click the ‘many’ link it goes to this blog search results page
If I click the ‘Add comment’ it takes me to a Blogger Login window (below) where I can login and make a comment if I have a blogger account.
Here’s where I make the comment once I’ve logged in. You’ll see in the lower right hand corner that I’m given a choice of which Blogger blog I want to post it to. I don’t actually have any live ones any more – I did have a few in the early days so really the ‘add a comment’ feature is pretty useless to me.
So really what we’ve got here is an extension that is tying together two Google products, namely Blogger and Blog Search. It’s a nifty tool to find information (ie blog search follows all different platforms of blogs which is useful) but the commenting feature will be pretty useless unless you’re a Blogspot/Blogger user. They do say in their FAQ that they hope to add other platforms in future to use the ‘add comments’ feature.
You can learn more about ‘Blogger Web Comments’ at their FAQ page.
update: After about 10 minutes of using the plugin I’m starting to find it annoying already. Maybe I’ll get used to it but I can see it could become quite distracting as so many of the pages I read are blogs and blogs will obviously feature very highly as commented pages – the little blue box is just always there in the corner of my eye.
