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Hey, guys, just a short one this week to keep things moving along in a positive direction while Chris and Bob play Skype Tag.

In this episode, Bob takes a quick breather and Chris steps in to talk about a couple of interesting tools for managing your online social activities.

Avatar Management:
Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatars) http://gravatar.com/

Comment Management System:
Disqus http://disqus.com/
Cocomment http://cocomment.com/

Not mentioned in the show itself are the differences between Disqus and CoComment that Chris feels are relevant.

“First, Disqus tracks comments based on your email address, but unfortunately, can only track one email per account at this point, so if you use multiple email addresses, like me, you have to open multiple accounts. However, Disqus also does a lot of other things better than Cocomment, such as being able to pull your Avatar from Gravatar, Twitter, Facebook and other places.

“On the other hand, Cocomment uses a Firefox browser plugin instead of email addresses to track comments, so you can track ALL of your comments in one account. However, this means that if you use more than 1 machine regularly (I use 3) you need to install the plugin in all of your machines. Also, the plugin is currently limited to Mozilla-based browsers, like Flock or Firefox, so if you tend to favor another browser, you have to start up Firefox and make the comment from there. Cocomment does have a bookmarklet option for other browsers, but that tends to be a bit more work than I’d want to have to do.”

“I have accounts with both, but I tend to favor Disqus, and simply hope that at some point in the near future, they’ll let me manage all of my email addresses under one account.”

Dan Thompson’s Rip Haywire online comics.com: http://comics.com/rip_haywire/
Dan’s personal blog: http://riphaywire.com/