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    Saturday, February 11, 2006

    3Bubbles - an individual chat for bloggers

    3Bubbles, which launches next week and is going to be an awesome way for bloggers and other websites to extend the conversation on the things that they write about. They have created a very easy to integrate Ajax based chat interface that can be added to every blog post automatically. (We will integrate it into the Resize blog to.) By simply adding a code snippet into the blog template, a link will be included in every post (think comments, trackbacks, and now chat) to open a chat window where readers can debate and discuss the post.
    The service will eventually integrate advertising into the ajax chat window, and the company says that they will split revenue with bloggers. Alternatively, bloggers can pay a monthly fee for the service and either turn off ads, or keep all of the advertising revenue. The hope is that 3Bubbles will be scalable enough to handle all of this distributed traffic. A somewhat comparableservice, ajchat, has had serious trouble keeping the service stable.
    This was seized 4 u from an Michael Arrington post at Techcrunch

    Friday, February 10, 2006

    Forget the caricatures of Muhammed - This is offensive:


    This was seized 4 u at Dispatches from the Culture Wars

    Tom Bethell, the Odd Duck Anti-Evolutioniston on AIDS -- The Breakdown

    Chris has been excoriating Tom Bethell (author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science") over on The Intersection and elsewhere (see, for example, here, here, and several posts here). However, since he's not yet done a takedown on Bethell's chaper on AIDS (titled "African AIDS: a Political Epidemic"), he suggested I have a go at it. Man, I knew the book would be bad, but it reaches a whole new level of terrible.
    Bethell's central thesis will be familiar to anyone who's read the anti-HIV arguments by Peter Duesberg and others. As the chapter title suggests, Bethell claims that AIDS in Africa is a made-up epidemic; AIDS is really due to simple malnutrition and dirty water supplies, rather than a virus. Government officials, scientists, and journalists are either too brainwashed or too scared to speak against the "AIDS orthodoxy." The evil liberals aren't concerned about AIDS because the real concern of the left, according to Bethell, is overpopulation in Africa (and hence the emphasis on condom use to prevent AIDS). Public health officials aren't actually concerned about disease in Africa--just overpopulation. Little did I know.
    However, Bethell's story is long on emotion and hyperbole, and short on facts. His references read like a report I wrote in my 9th grade English class: newspapers, a few books, magazines (heavy-hitters like Rolling Stone and SPIN), and a grand total of 2 references from science journals. Really, he should leave off the "Politically" portion of the title--the Incorrect Guide to Science is much more apt.
    Okay, okay. Enough snark. (C'mon, reading this was 20 minutes of my life I'll never get back--I think I'm entitled to some seething). So, on to address Bethell's claims.
    Get the whole article posted by John Farrell at AETIOLOGY

    Google Moon!

    We've all seen Google Earth. But the men and women of Google, apparently, have not stopped there. Check out Google Moon. This is really cool. It's nice to see what an engineering company can develop when given free reign.
    This was seized 4 u at Google Moon

    Optical illusions

    Do you like optical illusions? Here are two very different classics:
    Visit Michael Bach's website in order to view other examples.

    Plant cells for robot control

    Controlling robots in complex environments is not an easy task, but it would greatly increase their usages. Yet living organisms are facing complexity and successfully dealing with it. So why not apply lessons from nature to robotics? This is what did researchers from Japan and U.K. who built an interface between a plant and an omnidirectional hexapod robot. The interaction loop they realized between living plants and robots might lead to the integration of biological cells in other technological devices based on biohybrid architectures.
    Read the whole article that was seized 4 u at zdnet written by Roland Piquepaille here

    Thursday, February 09, 2006

    Chinese Man 'Jailed due to Yahoo!'

    The internet giant Yahoo has been accused of providing China with information that led to the jailing of a second internet writer. Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders claims that Yahoo released data which led to the arrest of Li Zhi. The online writer was jailed for eight years in 2003, after posting comments that criticised official corruption. Last year Yahoo was accused of giving information to Beijing which led to the imprisonment of reporter Shi Tao. Reporters Without Borders called on Yahoo to release the names of all internet writers whose identities it has revealed to the Chinese authorities.
    Read more...

    This was seized 4 u at BBC News

    Network Traffic Set to Music

    Nothing gets attention like the sound of a baby crying. Building on the idea that people are naturally attuned to sound, the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning has created software that translates network and server activity into music. And, their IT department operators can interpret the music to detect problems in the system. "Like with the babysitter monitor, you know when the baby's not happy," project leader and Telecommunications Technology Program Coordinator William Farkas said during an interview Wednesday. "The very appearance of violins tells you we're getting locked by spam now." Research Fellow Hong Tae Jeon sent an e-mail this week saying that the Institute, in the suburbs of Toronto, just completed a two year research project on Information Music, or iSIC, in which "art imitates the network." Now, the concept is in action at the Institute.
    Read more...

    This was seized 4 u at Yahoo! News

    Intact tomb found in Egypt's Valley of the Kings

    CAIRO (Reuters) - An American team has found what appears to be an intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the first found in the valley since that of Tutankhamun in 1922, one of the archaeologists said on Thursday. ADVERTISEMENT The tomb contains five or six mummies in intact sarcophagi from the late 18th dynasty, about the same period as Tutankhamun, but the archaeologists have not yet had the time or the access to identify them, the archaeologist added. The 18th dynasty ruled Egypt from 1567 BC to 1320 BC, a period during which the country's power reached a peak. The Valley of the Kings in southern Egypt contains the tombs of most of the pharaohs of the time but the archaeologist said the mummies in the newly found tomb need not be royal. "There are lots of non-royal tombs in the valley. It wouldn't be the only one by any means," said the archaeologist, who asked not to be named because the Egyptian authorities are planning a media event at the site on Friday.
    Read more...

    This was seized 4 u at Yahoo! News

    A day in the life of the chinese internet police

    揭秘:看看中国的网络警察每天都在做什么? (图) 天极网
    随着科学技术的发展,网络逐渐成为人们用来交流、获取信息的重要工具,但同时网络犯罪也随之而来。
      检索一天没发现任何问题
    The principal work of the Internet police is to look around the Internet to catch criminals. They monitor the Internet bars, they look for pornographic, reactionary and other harmful material on the Internet and they solve Internet crimes based upon the clues.
    There is not the excitement of making arrests, there is no need to carry guns and most of the time, they are in plain clothes looking like intellectuals at scientific research institutes. But their job skills are no less than the crime investigating police officers.

    A reporter was elated for a few days about the opportunity of working with the Internet police and here we go:

    The reporter began the forst day's work. For starters, the reporter launched a piece of software called "Network Detective" and found a list of Internet bar names. The reporter selected one site at random, and was immediately looking at the records of all the people who were on the Internet at the time. If there is an under-aged person, the interactive box at the bottom will indicate it. The Internet police will contact the Internet bar immediately or notify the appropriate department to check.
    So that was how the morning passed by. A site was selected and checked; then another site was selected and checked but the warning box at the bottom of the screen never showed anything.
    In order to be able to bring back some "work results" to the newspaper office, the reporter returned in the afternoon to look at web pages for harmful information.
    This was easy because it was just like surfing the Internet, right? The reporter opened the page and followed the specified rules to look at all the items on the page. If there are no problems, then the reporter moved to the next page. For several hours, it was opening pages, looking at them, closing them, repeatedly again and again for goodness knows how many times.
    The reporter kept hoping to find some problems during the work. In the end, the reporter felt that the letters on the computer monitor screen were dancing in the eyes and could not be seen clearly. Still, no problems had been found. Ma Xiaoting told the reporter that the Internet police search for harmful information at least four hours a day. She comforted the reporter: "Usually, we don't find anything all day. If we find problems every day, then the crime level on the Internet is too much." When the reporter thought about it, it seemed clear that the reporter's actual work experience would bring no real results. Originally, the reporter thought that Internet police work was relaxed and simple. It was just like searching for information on the Internet, and there may be some interesting stuff occasionally! After this experience, the reporter realized how boring and unexciting their work was. The reporter began to wonder: How can this experience be considered "fun-filled"?
    After a few hours without finding any harmful information, the reporter had tears in the eyes (caused by staring at the computer monitor screen for a long period of time), and the reporter began to curse the editor for assigning this tough assignment.When the hostess saw the angry look, she quickly offered comfort that sometimes nothing happens for a few days in a row. When the reporter heard that, it felt better.

    Read the full story on ZonaEuropa.
    This was seized 4 u at Zonaeuropa & Wenxuecity

    Lighting the way to a revolution


    The information superhighway owes its very existence to fibre optics.
    With a very thin tube, light and some engineering know-how you have the components for speeding information around the world. The communication revolution was set in motion 40 years ago, when a landmark paper was revealed to the engineering community. In 1966, Dr Charles Kuen Kao and George Hockham, both young research engineers from the Standard Telecommunications Laboratories, addressed a meeting at the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London with their exciting new findings on the possibilities of optical fibres. Optical fibres are transparent rods of glass or plastic stretched until they are extremely long, flexible and thinner than a human hair.

    Escaping light

    They carry information using a process called total internal reflection. A message is turned into light pulses, which then travel along the fibre, bouncing through the tube at such an angle that hardly any light is lost to processes such as refraction. This means that the light ray, and therefore the message, can arrive in their entirety at the other end of the fibre. Before 1966, the use of fibre optics for communication was extremely limited. Messages could only travel for a few metres before light began to be lost from the fibre, a process called attenuation which is measured in decibels per kilometre, where the loss of one decibel means a fall of about 20% of the signal strength. This made them unsuitable for communication over long distances, but Kao and Hockham's paper was to transform this perception.
    Read more...
    This was seized 4 u at BBC News

    Wednesday, February 08, 2006

    Space Rock Re-opens Mars Debate


    A carbon-rich substance found filling tiny cracks within a Martian meteorite could boost the idea that life once existed on the Red Planet. The material resembles that found in fractures, or "veins", apparently etched by microbes in volcanic glass from the Earth's ocean floor. Details will be presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, next month. All the processes of life on Earth are based on the element carbon. Proving carbon in Martian meteorites is indigenous - and not contamination from Earth - is crucial to the question of whether life once arose on the Red Planet.
    Read more...

    This was seized 4 u at BBC News

    Difference Engine Made from Legos


    An enterprising hacker has created a working "difference engine" -- a mechanical calculator first attempted in 19th Century by Charles Babbage -- out of legos. The difference engine was immortalized in the William Gibson/Bruce Sterling collaboration of the same name, and it's a perpetual source of hacker fascination (Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, financed the project and invented the idea of software for it because she was interested in handicapping horse races). Though Babbage was never able to get his design working, London's science museum did build a Babbage Engine that worked, thanks to the greater precision of twentieth-century machining techniques.
    Read more...

    This was seized 4 u at boingboing

    CEO Interview: Jon S. von Tetzchner of Opera Software


    Check out a fairly interesting interview with Jon Von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera. With so much hype about Firefox lately, it is good to hear a detailed discussion from Opera's CEO.

    Read more...

    This was seized 4 u at linuxdevices.com

    T. Rex gets a father figure

    Ask any dinner-party palaeontologist and they'll tell you that, despite its star turn in Jurassic Park, Tyrannosaurus rex didn't live in the Jurassic period. But now a team in China has found a tyrannousaur that did, and it gives us valuable clues about the rise of this clan of prehistoric predators.
    The new species, found in Xinjiang province in northwestern China, lived around 160 million years ago. This makes it more than twice as old as T. rex, and the most primitive known member of the family.At just 3 metres long, the creature is a small relative of T. rex, which could reach a mighty 13 metres. But its gaping, beak-like face armed with teeth, and its powerful legs, show that it too would have been a ferocious killer.The dinosaur's discoverers, led by Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, have named it Guanlong wucaii - meaning 'crested dragon from the five colours'. The name comes from the huge nasal crest on the creature's head, and the fact that it was found in a region of China characterized by many-coloured rocks.
    Dinosaur specimens of this vintage are rare, says Mark Norell, who is based at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and is part of the team who studied the find. Most other Jurassic dinosaur fossils have been unearthed in the Americas. "This fills in a big blank about tyrannosaurs," he says. "With samples from only one continent, you don't have a good picture."The presence of a nasal crest is particularly interesting, says Norell, because it is so similar to the head ornaments carried by many of today's birds. Both birds and carnivorous dinosaurs such as tyrannosaurs belong to the evolutionary family known as the theropods.
    The crest of G. wucaii probably functioned as a signal, either to attract potential mates or for species recognition. "It would not have been used for fighting - it would have been paper-thin," Norell says.If it was a sexual ornament, it might imply that this individual was a male. But if it was for species recognition, that would leave the dinosaur's sex in the balance, and determining sex using bones alone is tricky. "That's still a long way ahead," says Norell.
    This was seized 4 u at Nature & Newsvine

    The cutest new discovered species

    The golden-mantled tree kangaroo is just one of dozens of species discovered in late 2005 by a team of Indonesian, Australian, and U.S. scientists on the island of New Guinea.

    The animal is the rarest arboreal, jungle-dwelling kangaroo in the world, the researchers say. This was the first time the mammal was found in Indonesia, making it only the second site in the world where the species is known to exist.


    The kangaroo was discovered on an expedition in the Foja Mountains of Indonesia.
    Please read the full article at National Geographic News.

    This was seized 4 u at National Geographic

    Tuesday, February 07, 2006

    Shouldn't there be life on Mars?

    One of the paradoxes of recent explorations of the Martian surface is that the more we see of the planet, the more it looks like Earth, despite a very big difference: Complex life forms have existed for billions of years on Earth, while Mars never saw life bigger than a microbe, if that.

    Hills in Chile and on Mars
    Two hillslopes in the Atacama Desert of Chile – one of bedrock (A) and the other covered with soil (B) – look amazingly like the Columbia Hills on Mars (C) once the yellowish grey Martian sky has been artificially colored blue and the red color of the rocks has been removed. (Mars image, acquired by the rover Spirit, courtesy of NASA/JPL/Cornell University

    "The rounded hills, meandering stream channels, deltas and alluvial fans are all shockingly familiar," said William E. Dietrich, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. "This caused us to ask: Can we tell from topography alone, and in the absence of the obvious influence of humans, that life pervades the Earth? Does life matter?"
    In a paper published in the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Nature, Dietrich and graduate student J. Taylor Perron reported, to their surprise, no distinct signature of life in the landforms of Earth. "Despite the profound influence of biota on erosion processes and landscape evolution, surprisingly,…there are no landforms that can exist only in the presence of life and, thus, an abiotic Earth probably would present no unfamiliar landscapes," said Dietrich. Instead, Dietrich and Perron propose that life - everything from the lowest plants to large grazing animals - creates a subtle effect on the land not obvious to the casual eye: more of the "beautiful, rounded hills" typical of Earth's vegetated areas, and fewer sharp, rocky ridges. "Rounded hills are the purest expression of life's influence on geomorphology," Dietrich said. "If we could walk across an Earth on which life has been eliminated, we would still see rounded hills, steep bedrock mountains, meandering rivers, etc., but their relative frequency would be different."
    When a NASA scientist acknowledged to Dietrich a few years ago that he saw nothing in the Martian landscape that didn't have a parallel on Earth, Dietrich began thinking about what effects life does have on landforms and whether there is anything distinctive about the topography of planets with life, versus those without life.
    "One of the least known things about our planet is how the atmosphere, the lithosphere and the oceans interact with life to create landforms," said Dietrich, a geomorphologist who for more than 33 years has studied the Earth's erosional processes. "A review of recent research in Earth history leads us to suggest that life may have strongly contributed to the development of the great glacial cycles, and even influenced the evolution of plate tectonics."

    Gabilan Mesa of central California
    A perspective view of the Gabilan Mesa of central California, derived from a high-resolution laser altimetry map. Such distinct, periodically spaced ridges and valleys result from erosional processes that are strongly influenced by biota. Nonetheless, no unique topographic signature of life on Earth has yet been found.

    One of the main effects of life on the landscape is erosion, he noted. Vegetation tends to protect hills from erosion: Landslides often occur in the first rains following a fire. But vegetation also speeds erosion by breaking up the rock into smaller pieces. "Everywhere you look, biotic activity is causing sediment to move down hill, and most of that sediment is created by life," he said. "Tree roots, gophers and wombats all dig into the soil and raise it, tearing up the underlying bedrock and turning it into rubble that tumbles downhill." Because the shape of the land in many locations is a balance between river erosion, which tends to cut steeply into a slope's bedrock, and the biotically-driven spreading of soil downslope, which tends to round off the sharp edges, Dietrich and Perron thought that rounded hills would be a signature of life. This proved to be untrue, however, as their colleague Ron Amundson and graduate student Justine Owen, both of the campus's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, discovered in the lifeless Atacama Desert in Chile, where rounded hills covered with soil are produced by salt weathering from the nearby ocean. "There are other things on Mars, such as freeze-thaw activity, that can break rock" to create the rounded hills seen in photos taken by NASA's rovers, Perron said. They also looked at river meanders, which on Earth are influenced by streamside vegetation. But Mars shows meanders, too, and studies on Earth have shown that rivers cut into bedrock or frozen ground can create meanders identical to those created by vegetation.
    The steepness of river courses might be a signature, too, they thought: Coarser, less weathered sediment would erode into the streams, causing the river to steepen and the ridges to become higher. But this also is seen in Earth's mountains. "It's not hard to argue that vegetation affects the pattern of rainfall and, recently, it has been shown that rainfall patterns affect the height, width and symmetry of mountains, but this would not produce a unique landform," Dietrich said. "Without life, there would still be asymmetric mountains."
    Their conclusion, that the relative frequency of rounded versus angular landforms would change depending on the presence of life, won't be testable until elevation maps of the surfaces of other planets are available at resolutions of a few meters or less. "Some of the most salient differences between landscapes with and without life are caused by processes that operate at small scales," Perron said. Dietrich noted that limited areas of Mars' surface have been mapped at two-meter resolution, which is better than most maps of the Earth. He is one of the leaders of a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported project to map in high resolution the surface of the Earth using LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) technology. Dietrich co-founded the National Center of Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), a joint project between UC Berkeley and the University of Florida to conduct LIDAR mapping showing not only the tops of vegetation, but also the bare ground as if denuded of vegetation. The research by Dietrich and Perron was funded by NSF's National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program and NASA's Astrobiology Institute.

    This was seized 4 u at Berkeley news and was written by Robert Sanders

    Dance The Robot

    The following is seized as a whole from The Age and is written by by Penelope Debelle:

    GONE are the twirling aerial ropes that became something of a 1990s signature for the Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre. Enter the robots, towering, ambulatory, geometric structures that cross art deco with Lego, or smaller, silvery creatures that swarm across the stage with bunched spidery legs. They perform as equal partners with the ADT at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in March, separately or strapped to the dancers' bodies like mutated insect prosthetics.
    ADT artistic director Garry Stewart and his Devolution collaborator,
    French-Canadian Louis-Philippe Demers, have rejected the Hollywood cliche of "man versus machines" with its vision of the tiny human dancer paling before the brutal machine. "Our dancers are quite violent," Stewart says. "Their vocabulary is the antithesis of that kind of beauty and lyricism, so, in many ways, the movement of the dancers has referenced the angularity and staccato rhythms of the machinery - not that I've got the dancers getting around on-stage looking like machines. But we have tried to create a choreographic connection between the machinery and the dancers."
    The band of robots built for this world premiere season are in no way humanoid.
    "They are not becoming more like people. In fact, I don't see the point in this," Demers says of his robots. "I try to stick always to something that looks formal, abstract or geometrically based, but when they start moving, they become quite organic. It's like challenging a bit of the notion of the living and non-living organism."
    Devolution is among the world's first major collaborations between dancers and robots and is the culmination of an idea Stewart had when he saw Demers' robotics in Europe. Demers, who has created more than 175 machines, is a freelance designer who specialises in machines as media. Based in Germany, he has staged numerous European installations and robot performances and, last year, did an operetta in Lille, mixing live music with abstract robotic angels and devils. He has integrated a robot into a dance performance before, but never collaborated in work where robots and dancers move together. The software is complex and tedious to construct yet the machines, at times, mimic the organic movement of humans.
    Some of them are among the biggest Demers has had to construct and have enormous stage presence, moving precariously in a way that is intimidating. "It's always recorded as a violent act," Demers says of the impact of a large or noisy machine. "When you start your blender at home, you always step aside. There is something about these objects - you anthropomorphise the action."
    Instead of conflict and battle, Stewart has built a work around ecosystems, evolution and mutation and depicts his dancers as creatures, not unlike the machines. While the dancers become dehumanised, Demers' robots recreate biology through organic movement, narrowing the divide.Stewart says the comparison is interesting and real: many people working in robotics see humans as incredibly complex machines operated by computers so wondrous they have simply created an illusion of consciousness that we define as human."They see it as just a degree of complexity," Stewart says. "So there is this interesting interplay between the simple technology of the robotics in the work, and the complexity of the human body as a machine."Like Stewart, Demers, who has been working in Adelaide since December to build his robot ensemble, wants to suggest life as a mechanical construction as much as an organic one."The machines are so stereotyped, so loaded by science fiction, but these are really abstract, moving shapes," Demers says. "It's more like challenging the notion of what is life, rather than just saying 'man versus machine'.".Stewart, who says his dancers are passionate about working with the robots, is amazed at how simple machines can elicit such powerful emotions from an audience."As soon as we see these machines we register a veil of consciousness that obviously isn't there," he says. "Then, when you have the machines on stage in relation to fully fleshed human beings, this very strange tension and narrative takes place."
    This wasseized 4 u at The Age and was written by Penelope Debelle

    Monday, February 06, 2006

    Great project - bad communication (or just a moron that just doesn't want to understand)?

    Scanning through my usual webplaces I came across an article by Roland Piquepaille at "Emerging Technology Trends". Its about another interesting EU-funded project called VIKEF which means "Virtual Information and Knowledge Environment Framework". Thats my thing - sounds like a great project and I read this posting in order to get an overview but was wondering why the heck it dispite of my positive intention kept non-understandable for me?
    After scanning the
    VIKEF website I began to realise why. The following is the key message about the project:
    "VIKEF bridges the gap between the partly implicit knowledge and information conveyed in scientific and business content resources (e.g. text, speech, images) and the explicit representation of knowledge required for a targeted and effective access, dissemination, sharing, use, and annotation of ICK resources by scientific and business communities and their information- and knowledge-based work processes. R&D; within VIKEF builds on and significantly extends the current Semantic Web efforts by addressing crucial operationalisation and application challenges in building up real-world semantically enriched virtual information and knowledge environments. VIKEF tackles challenges like:
    • How to (semi-)automatically build up the tailored ontologies required for semantic annotation from textual and multimedia application content
    • How to efficiently link vast amounts of ICK resources to these ontologies
    • How to reuse this semantic information to gain added value within KVC applications
    • How to consistently handle content-, community, and domain-driven evolution in such environments"

    Yes, Roland Piquepaille did in fact a decent job making this project interesting for the masses ;-)
    but I am still lost. Does anybody care and makes this project understandable for me?

    This was seized 4 u at Emerging Technology Trends & VIKEF

    30 Boxes - The new killer application (or just another webcalendar)

    The new calendar 30 Boxes with the motto "It's Your Life" has been released to public beta today. For many reasons the calendar marked seems to be the most (over)crowded target for many new "Web2.0" applications and only a few of them will survive. The question is whether 30 Boxes has what it takes. It seems to have the ingredients to make it to the top within this market. The developers seem quite enthusiastic, their is a broad "undergroundish" fan base and the first public beta is really impressive. I have written a rather critical article about the Spongecell calendar and 30 Boxes is in fact very similar to Spongecell, it even lacks some of the core functionalities like the ability to import a calendar & the drag & drop features. But 30 Boxes also has some unique extras with the ability to share and to integrate rss feeds etc.
    The major shortcomings for me are the missing import functions, subscription & email notification (which is a "No Go" for me) but I am sure that this one will improve rapidly.
    Why? - I don't know why ;-)

    Sunday, February 05, 2006

    CoComment - Tracking all your comments

    I did stumble over this new webservice at TechCrunch went curious and checked the info page from CoComment. I believe that they have a really great idea, whether it works for me is the other question which I first will be able to answer upon when it is possible to use this service. Right know it is in "beta"-mode and allows only "friends" (which I am apparrently not ;-)) to participate.
    This is from the "How does it work" section of CoComment:
    When you become a member of coComment, you'll install a simple bookmarklet on your browser. Whenever you make comments on another blog, you'll do so using this bookmarklet. Using coComment allow for 3 things:CaptureFirst, when you sign into your account on the coComment home page, you'll be taken to "your conversations". In other words, you don't have to have your own blog to benefit from the coComment service! In "your conversations", you'll find a centralized list of all the comments you've made on other people's blogs, with a link back to the original blog where you made the comment. Additionally, you'll find all comments posted by other coComment members which are related to your original comment - creating a flowing conversation.
    How do we do this? Essentially, when you and other coComment users use the coComment bookmarklet to make a comment, the coComment service makes a duplicate of that comment. This copy of your comments, and all related comments from other users, are then automatically displayed in "your comments" on the coComment service. ShareSecond, if you have your own blog, you'll be able to display a window on your blog called your "blogbox", which is basically a miniature copy of "your conversations" right on your blog. This is not only convenient for you - as you won't have to go to coComment's web page to view your conversations, but also brings the value of your comments on other's blogs back to you and your blog. And lastly, it allows readers of your blog to see your comments, conversations and topics of interest from within your blog.AlertAs an added bonus, the comment stream generated by your conversations will be available to you not only in your blog box, but also as an RSS feed, so you can track your conversations on your favorite RSS reader, along with all your other regularly updated information. And keep your eyes on coComment for future alert services already in the works - such as SMS, IM and email alerts!
    This was seized 4 u at CoComment & TechCrunch