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CoComment, a venture-backed startup founded last year in Geneva, Switzerland, is one of a number of companies offering technology to better manage this growing network of opinions online. The company says its biggest challenge now is finding ways to monetize a technology that is used by millions of Internet users across hundreds of thousands of Web sites. To date, coComment has raised €3.6 million ($5.6 million) in an initial funding from SwissCom of Zurich and NetAge of Japan. The company is currently seeking to raise a second round of about $5 million, which it hopes will carry it over to profitability.CoComment is used by a range of online publishers to receive and publish comments on their sites. Its one of those ubiquitous, if largely invisible, technologies that usually go unnoticed by the average Web user. CEO Matt Colebourne says that, outside of the blogosphere, the trend toward expressing opinions online has companies scrambling to accommodate their opinionated customers. Among the 270,000 Web sites that use the coComment conversation platform free of charge are gossip site HollywoodToday.net, women's travel site TangoDiva.com and the site for Danny Bonaduce's daily radio show. Last week coComment unveiled some new features that will help sites rank and rate their viewer's comments to help the best ones rise to the top. Colebourne says the company hopes to be profitable by the second half of next year, largely by supplementing its free service by charging fees for add-ons. We've previously written about the proliferation of online discussions facilitated by services like Twitter, which is is evolving as a tool for businesses wishing to foster dialogue with customers. Since launching in 2007, there has been growing awareness among companies about the value of soliciting reader or customer comments, Colebourne says. "When we started the business, conversations were something that happened mainly in the blogosphere, and most big media sites were a little concerned about inviting comments." About five new sites are signing up for coComment every week, the executive says, motivated by statistics showing that traffic to a site increases as much as 10 times once the site enables comments. Along with powering comments on individual sites, coComment aggregates all the comments on its own Web site to help users locate ongoing conversations on topics of interest. "It's not massively complicated, but most sites use a third-party system," Colebourne says, explaining that sites ideally want a technology sophisticated enough to do some automatic policing, for instance, by blocking banned words or phrases. While many businesses continue to resist the shift toward inviting fans and critics alike to publicly express their opinions, Colebourne points out the risks. "I ask them, 'Do you really think you've stopped anyone from saying something negative about you?' " -- Andrea Orr See April 24 post on Twitter from Tech Confidential
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