I bumped into Artiklz at the Blog08 conference in Amsterdam last month, and got a rundown of what the LA-based startup was working on while the service was still in alpha mode. Today, Artiklz is releasing its finetuned and upgraded application in private beta with a slew of new features.

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Artiklz aggregates comments around content from a variety of services (including Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, FriendFeed, Mixx, Delicious, Diigo etc.). In addition, they offer plug-ins to track conversations on major blogging services like Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and self-hosted WordPress blogs and centralize what’s being said and referenced regarding your own content as well as discussions about it across the web.

Artiklz enables you to get notifications by e-mail, SMS, IM or a web interface, whenever a new comment is made about your post on any given service, which is a great way to track conversations across the social web without the need to actively monitor different services. You can also add a badge to your blog that gives your readers the option to be notified when you post a new article, or when somebody leaves a comment on a given post, and you can even track a specific individual’s comments. The startup has added a Firefox toolbar and bookmarklet today that should make it easier and faster to track conversations even without being a registered user (demo video) and has also released an improved web interface.

There are many startups in the comment tracking space (e.g. coComment, SezWho and Disqus) but Artiklz in my opinion doesn’t compete with them but rather with aggregation services like uberVu (see recent review) and search engines like Backtype.

Testing the application reminded me of this blog post published earlier this year by Loïc Le Meur about the ‘(de)centralization of me’. If he stills feels the same way about the fragmentation of his social map, he might want to give Artiklz a try.