Bob and I have both lamented about the ever growing spread of social media tools geared towards expanding and engaging one’s community. I’ve dabbled in some of them, each of which addresses a specific need for community building. Today, Carter Harkins introduced us to a tool that I think I will be spending a lot of time getting to know. It’s called Crowd About and it fills a need, specific to Podcasters, that no other service does: contextual commenting. Carter is one of its creators.

Crowd About offers a simple way for your community to be more actively engaged by allowing it to create text or multimedia comment to any media file in your Podcast feed, and then apply the comment to a specific location of that file. Imagine having your content indexed by comment threads and being able to consume comments by clicking a specific location of your media file, and then participating in the discussion yourself. In fact, you can even index your own content and then let the conversations begin. That’s the core of this tool.

It doesn’t stop there. Crowd About can be integrated into your own Podcast site (WordPress and others) so that the “playground” (my term, not theirs) comes to you and your community - instead of you and your community having to go to the playground. About the only drawback of that integration is that participants are required to be logged into a Crowd About account.

Of course, requisite profile and friends technology is part of the tool. Has anyone figured out how to create a single friends repository in WordPress that can be referenced by every other technology, yet?