Comments on blog posts have always been the forgotten son of web content. When you make a comment, you never know how it will be read, where it will end up, and because of spam issues, they rarely show up in search engines. Also, because of NoFollow, your links don’t matter either.

BackType, a YCombinator funded company started by Toronto’s Christopher Golda and Mike Montano is the first tool that just may solve these problems. Some have gone in this direction before, but have had technically top-heavy models.

Instead of creating a new standard, or trying to convince blog authors to make changes to their site, BackType scours the web just like other search engines and it scrapes the comments, or they pick up the comments RSS feeds, which tools like WordPress output on request.

The moment I used BackType for the first time, I had a total “aha!” moment and I knew exactly when and why I would use the service.

Chris and Mike’s first startup was iPartee, a beautiful but underused (at least in Canada) event tool. Austin Hill also interviewed them here on StartupNorth just over a month ago.