By: Senior staff writer – Easton Ellsworth

BackType is pretty cool.

It’s only been around since August 2008 – only four months since launch – but it’s already one of my favorite tools for tracking what people say on blogs around the Web.

They’re effectively doing what I always hoped coComment would do – build a blog comment search engine / directory.

And now you can actually use BackType to track mentions of any keyword or phrase you want in the commentosphere.

So finally you can find out what’s being said about you, your website, your company, your competitor, your favorite basketball player, etc. in a quick and easy way.

I believe blog comments are a market that will evolve quickly over the next 12 months. With Google and Facebook positioning themselves to claim vast swaths of blog comment indices and monitoring capabilities, it is now certain that blog comments are going to be more aggressively watched and monetized.

There’s also Digg and YouTube and plenty of other sharing/bookmarking social sites that offer comment threads we might term “blog comments” as well. Someone is going to aggregate them all.

What do you think of BackType? Have you used it yet? Do you think this new tech startup will eventually get snatched up by Google or Facebook, perhaps? Let the rumor mill start to churn.