Within the blogosphere, comments are a strange animal.

Comments welcomed by blog writers, they’re often far more interesting and insightful as blog posts, and, of course, they’re a favorite tool of spammers.

The other reality is comments are seen as the ugly cousins to blog posts. Blog posts get top ranking as the stars of the blogosphere while comments play second fiddle, even though many people get as much from comments as the blog posts themselves. (Trackbacks used to be supporting stars but they’ve disappeared)

The question is how do you put the spotlight on comments so you can easily find commenters that you find insightful, funny, controversial, etc.?

The answer may be BackType, a Y Combinator startup created by two Toronto-natives, Chris Golda and Michael Montano. Touted as “Twitter for Comments” by TechCrunch, BackTrack is a tool where you can aggregate and search for comments.

For example, you can put together a list of the people whose comments you want to see, and then check out the blog post they commented on. Or you can search for comments by people, keywords, exact phrases and dates. See the results below for “iPhone” and “Rob Hyndman”.

To me, BackType seems like an interesting service but I haven’t played with it enough to determine if it will have mass appeal. And like its Y Combinator comment cousin, Disqus (and Twitter), it’s difficult to see a business model, although it may be a valuable tool for marketer who want to track social media conversations.

BackType could also be controversial among people who believe that comments are the property of blog owners, and they shouldn’t be scraped so BackTrack can build a business from other peoples’ work.

Nicole Simon has some thoughts about BackType, including her belief that BackTrack’s T&C protects its content more than the comments of the bloggers it’s aggregating. On the other side of the coin, Louis Gray likes BackTrack but not with the same enthusiasm as some other social media services he’s focused on.

For more on Chris Golda and Michael Montano, check out StartupNorth’s interview with them while they attended the mesh conference last May. Golda and Montano’s first startup was an invitation service called iPartee.

Technorati Tags: BackTrack, comments, YCombinator

Big news! TechCrunch has gone through a pretty extensive redesign.

In post, Mark Hendrickson explained that:

“Our overarching goal was to clean things up, both on the surface and under the hood. TechCrunch had become bloated in many ways, with the homepage taking way too long to load and the scroll bar going on forever and ever.”

You heard it here first but what TechCrunch just completed is going to be emulated (copied?) by many of the leading blog sites that have evolved from one-man operations into blog machines/media publishers with a team of writers churning out so much content to point where there are so many posts, it’s nearly impossible to read them. In other words, they’re suffering from a bad case of blog bloat.

Mark my words, you’ll likely see GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, paidContent, Mashable, et al go through similar redesigns in the near future. It’s not just readability driving this exercise but economic pragmatism; the more page views they can encourage, the more real estate there is for advertisers.

Take a look at what TechCrunch is doing by providing excerpts from its new “home page” that provide readers with a taste before encouraging them to “Read Post”. It’s slightly less convenient for the reader but a brilliant move by TechCrunch.

For what it’s worth, this evolution from blog to online newspaper is something I suggested a few months ago. I’m surprised it hasn’t gained more traction already but you can bet your boots that “the redesign” will become a big trend over the next six months.

Here’s the old and the new TechCrunch:

Technorati Tags: blogs, techcrunch