CommentPower takes some cues from MyBlogLog, which was recently picked up by Yahoo, CoComment, which seems to have lost whatever early traction they had with early adopters and TailRank an aggregator/memetracker which finds the hottest posts from thousands of blogs. There are hints of Digg and Slashdot as well.

CommentPower lets you rank and filter comments based on popularity. Sorting comments based on reputation (single site only for now) is a snap.

Jitendra will be posting a lot more about CommentPower on his blog and the website soon enough. Once sufficiently groked, this is the kind of service that lends itself to all sorts of improvements and enhancements, although it appears quite useful even for single blogs in it’s current incarnation.

The only downside I see so far is the reliance on blog plugins, which are the Achilles heel when it comes to gaining traction in the blogosphere. It’s going to take thousands of installs for the system to achieve enough mass to become truly useful as a social tool, for now brings new functionality to comments, which have always been an afterthought on most blogging systems.

We’re moving from driving traffic to a blog to driving traffic to the comment section of blogs. The atomization of the conversation continues, all the way down to the Twitter level.

Freakanomics has a post about comments, which has 115 comments of varying level of interest and insight, about, you guessed it, comments.

Recently, I’ve been in the WordPress forums looking for answers to pretty much the same questions everyone else is asking. The problem is not the people, it’s the way the usual forum software (blog and phpbb) and their ilk operate. Tagging questions is good, marking them closed is good, but there is no good way to hide bogus answers, broken code snippets, etc. Not that we want to necessarily remove comments/tips/hints, but with the evolution of software, related plugins and so forth, it’s often the case that last week’s answer becomes next weeks problem all over again when some supporting software is upgraded.

Case in point, the original Feedburner support forum post for integrating Feedburner with various blogs was something like 10 pages long and chock full of misinformation which sent people down the wrong path for hours at a time. Now, FB has cleaned up the forum with lots of sticky posts that don’t allow comments.

The optimal solution is somewhere between closed stickies and forum comments. Start with a simple way of filtering the conversation based on a particular setup, installed plugins, etc would be a good start. So would a Corrections tag. WordPress forums mark entire entries as “needs help” but who wants to write an entire page? Too meta. Much of the information at WordPress is for version 1.5, which is ancient, but still requires lots of support. Talking about 1.5 and 2.0+ on the same page is a nightmare and leads to more wasted time.

I’m not picking on WP or FB, these are the most obvious places in my online world that I go to often and walk away scratching my head more often than not.
When it comes to conversations, blog comment systems are the worst, but thats for another day.