CommenTag | official blog

I noticed something strange on my parent’s Senseo. First, it seems to take longer to boot up than mine. I should investigate this and do some benchmarks. And second, the “auto shut-off” function doesn’t work. The Senseos have differents versions but mine is older. I really don’t have a good explication; I can only suppose that my parents’ machine is more used. I will keep you updated on this.

Besides this, I have been looking at Amazon’s S3 and EC2. While I think EC2 is more adapted for computing than for web services, it can help to manage the scalability.

EC2 is a service to run virtual machines (”instances”). Sure, you can build an (almost) complete virtual web infrastructure if you want. But if you want reverse proxy and load balancing, it’s up to you. You have to configure everything yourself. While this is interesting (and fun) to do, it will take a lot of time to build and maintain. Or you can use solutions like scalr or weoceo. The first is free and open source but very young and the second costs and is not so fine-tunable. Those solutions integrate load-balancing and managing tools.

S3 is the storage solution. It stores juste simple files (”buckets”) and the virtual machine images. The most important is that EC2/S3 lacks database support. Sure you can use S3 to backup the database but that’s just a hack and I wouldn’t recommend it for production use.

I think of EC2/S3 is not going to replace a real server for a web service but I still think about it for the scalability. Or to answer traffic spikes, like what Judd Vinet did (see http://hostingfu.com/article/setting-up-part-time-web-cluster-with-amazons-ec2).

I will continue to investigate Amazon’s services’ use for commentag. Stay tuned.

Here we are!

CommenTag is now open!
You can register your blog and download the Wordpress plugin for free!

Do not hesitate to give it a try because the coolest thing with this plugin is that it does not mess up your database and it doesn’t steal your comments!
You can activate/desactivate the plugin without loosing any single comment.

Once the plugin is activated, your blog will have these very nice new features:

• Visitors can tag their comments to enhance their visibility;
• A tagcloud with tagged comments shows up above all your discussions;
• Visitors can filter comments by selecting a mix of tags using the tagcloud.

We are looking forward to hear from you!
So please leave us your feedback!

On Tuesday, I’ve been in a meeting with Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog) and Reshma Sohoni (SeedCamp).
If there is one thing very special to remember is when Scott told me that “my problem, as many French people, is that you wait way too much to make things looking great before releasing anything.
While American people would release crap, but release something and grab the market out there.”

We are not French people though!
But we do speak French so somehow we have been influenced (I admit).
So let’s stop that influence and let’s start releasing more often less polished, but fully functional, plugins.

So, by the end of this weekend, we gonna release the first open alpha of CommenTag plugin for Wordpress.
Tell your friends, the nightmare of any of us who ever tried to catch up a conversation on a blog will soon be forgotten!*

PS: I will publish soon the minutes of this meeting, there is of course much more to say about it! Already many thanks to you guys for your great advises!

* Mmmm, at least on the blogs which will use our plugin

This is unexpected! Microsoft just contacted us today. They said they are impressed by commentag and would like to discuss about a buyout. They see great opportunities in our technology. Future projects concern integrating the technology in the MSN portal to tag content and comments, and eventually integrate also hotmail. We expect Microsoft to rebrand commentag as “Hottag” but nothing as been confirmed yet.

Meanwhile, we have also been contacted by Google. It seems that they fear microsoft to integrate commentag in their product, because it would give Redmond’s software make a significant advantage over google.

We’ll keep you updated about the Microsoft-Google story… stay tuned!

I have been working hard lately to get the new server running. That’s exaclty the moment when I really appreciate coffee.

I have to say that I’m a proud owner of a Senseo machine, and I enjoy it! It may not be the best coffee in the world but the machine is simply brilliant. Push a button, put a coffee pad, push another button and that’s it! It soooo easy to make a cup of coffee. My machine also has the “Auto-off” feature (apparently not included in the first versions) which shuts off the machine when not used.

Those Senseo guys just follow the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle and got it all right. I’m pretty sure that if they didn’t invented the Senseo, Apple would have. Yeah right, Senseo is to coffee machine what Mac is to computers. That’s how everything should be in life: just simple and easy to use.

Oh, yeah I almost forgot to tell you about the server. Apache, mySQL and java (no silly joke with coffee) where configured and data was migrated. www.commentag.com is now running on the new server. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you notice any problem.

Next step: add the last features, nlp integration and bugs fixes in API before open beta

Yesterday night (Thursday 13th of March) I had a one hour skype call with Scott Rafer, CEO of MyBlogLog and founder of Lookery.
We have definitely a lot to learn from Scott’s experience. And as expected it was a very useful conversation.
Scott has been very kind an gave me a lot of advises that I want to share with you below.
If you are also in the process of bootstrapping your company (hi guys from @minibar!), they might be more than interesting.

He wouldn’t invest though as he is already in too many businesses.
However he is more than keen to help us and that’s priceless.

Sum up of his feedback:

• He loves the idea
• He loves the way we implemented it so far (letting users to create on-the-fly their own taxonomy by selecting multiple tags)
• We are not ambitious enough
• Although we can start with tagging comments, we should extend our system to any kind of small content (”bunch of microdocuments”). We could tag twitter messages, polls of polldaddy.com, presentations on slideshares.net, … plenty of such little things.(personal note: the web so far has been all about interconnecting meaningless html pages. The future of the web would be an interconnection of smaller entities (an address, a contact, an event, a bank statement, a poll, …) but which convey a defined meaning. The thought of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, is worth reading on that topic).
• We should change the name “commentag” to something else otherwise it’s gonna restrict us to deal with other things than comments.
  • His proposals:
    • tagtronica.com “it’s 4 syllables and 3’s normally but limit, but it’s not terrible”
    • tagtize.com “is shorter but it bugs me”
  • My proposals:
    • centraltags.com (I really like this one)
      
      Quick draft for a logo
      
    • tagtoes.com (funny enough, my colleague David told me this afternoon that a toetag is a tag we used to put on the toe of the dead people (with their names and other infos). That might be a good name then as we will tag content that would be lost in a mass of other content, and if you are lost, then you dead somehow).
    • tagtoo.com (unfortunately the domain is already taken…)
  • Any other proposal? Feel free to let us your thoughts below!
• We should not care at this stage about any business model
• Our only concern now should be:
  • raise £300k to put 5 guys (included ourselves) full time on the project
  • Only address the mass market (don’t care about B2B)
  • Once you get into people referrer logs, you’re done. (ie. for the moment, we do not exist yet)
• When asking about moving to SF he answered: “San Francisco (SF) is a great place for funding, but terrible place for hiring”
• What a lot of companies do is setting their commercial management in SF for the networking and let their CTO and engineers in another country.
• We should consider using a virtual hosting platform like the one proposed by Amazon. @Arnaud: please go check it out!
• Next steps:
  • Define a roadmap for the different phases of our project
  • 1-2 page business summary. Not about the features, but more about the market size, the opportunities, … (ie. SWOT analysis)

After thoughts:

While seeking for a name, I land on tagfs.
A name a bit too techy but the idea is all in there: We could imagine a file system for the web which would be mainly based on tags.
tagfs would be a platform containing only i-nodes (ie. only reference to be able to find the content back - like in the unix filesystem).
Any web service would be able to register any atomic entity (a poll, a presentation, a picture, a bank statement, a booking, a thought, …) in that platform. Allowing users to gather at a glance all their stuff concerning, for example, their last holidays (pictures, contacts, bills, reviews of hotels, …).

To be continued…
(stay tuned)

Tonight, I’ve presented CommenTag at the London MiniBar.
It was a really great experience and we had fantastic feedback.

We would be more than happy to have your feedback as well!
Please drop us a comment below this post (and don’t forget to tag it!)

Here is the keynote

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