T11M

While on the topic of online aggregation services I thought I should give a rundown of BackType.  BackType’s goal is to bring together all of the blog comments posted on the Internet and allow users to track them.  This service effectively provides two functionalities – it makes tracking comments by specific people very easy and it allows BackType users to ensure that they are not be impersonated on the web.  I’m not very interested at following other people’s comments, I’m much more interested in good blog postings and news.  However, I am very interested in making sure that my comments are attributed to me and that my identity is not being used by someone else to post spam or fake comments.  For much more popular people (Barack Obama, Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, etc), I’m sure BackType is a very powerful service.  I’m sure they are constantly being impersonated and fake/spam comments are being posted using their identity.  BackType allows anyone to quickly and easily make sure that their commenting identity is not being abused.

So far my test of BackType’s service has been fairly limited, however it has pulled in all of the comments I have posted on blogs.  Unfortunately, BackType has not recognized my comments on Lifehacker.  BackType did extend its service a few months back to include Reddit and Digg, but they obviously haven’t gotten all of the major sites that aren’t strictly blogs.  I’m curious to see how the service will develop over the next few months and I’m really hoping for better support on sites like Lifehacker.  If you do a lot of commenting on different blogs, I encourage you to visit BackType and sign up for an account.