Commenting takes a new robe

Commenting systems were a less touched area until recently. CoComment has been monitoring your comments through bookmarklets since some time. And now,  many startups decided to take it to next level. Suddenly names like Disqus, Intense Debate, Js-Kit, SezWho appeared on the scene and, suddenly they have inundated us with  options leading to a better commenting system for our blog.

The key idea here is to aggregate the distributed effort in commenting at different blogs, and generate an community ecosystem hosted across various blogs. Over time, this generates a lot of information, which can be  imminently used to show reputation, ratings and statistics. You need to have an account with them as commenter, and then whenever you comment on “compatible blogs”, your comments are managed by them. This is next version of web 2.0 widgets, and these systems are deployed using javascript pull on your blogs. However, still these systems are not interoperable, and you need to create a separate account with each one them if you frequently comment on a set of blogs, which has adopted more than one of these systems.

The upsides are a good reputation statistics. Till now reputation had no clear definition. There were blogs/forums like slashdot which had their own homegrown and proven reputation system on comments. But a reputation across blogs is something new and useful. Some people tend to put good comments very frequently, and it is a fun to read those. New and improved commenting system are a great help in discovering and managing this information, which was previously scattered across the web. 

SezWho is an offering from Jitendra Gupta. It offers a standard five star ratings, augmented by a simple question “Was this comment useful to you?”. This system has been adopted by readwriteweb. Currently it supports Movable Type and Wordpress blogging platforms. I did not see thread views there. They provide option to filter comments, thus enabling the user to view better ones, as rated by its community. The ratings are translated in ”star power”. Users have to fill out email addresses in order to rate any comments, but to ease this, they are working towards enabling openid. In order to deploy it on your blog, they issue a unique key, just like google’s urchin tracker, which aids in statistic generation at their side. Reputation calculations are a recursive heuristic, like google’s pagerank based on many variables like reputation score of commenter, frequency in participation and context of topic. They claim that reputation is context sensitive, which implies that your reputation on music blogs, will be different from what it is on say technology blogs. Seems like a powerful system in place.

Disqus is a Y Combinator baby. It is publically still not available, but you can see it in action at Fred Wilson’s “A VC Blog”. It too has a reputation building rating system in place. It supports nested comments, and had some good usability features like parent child highlighting. Comment layout is customizable and one has option to choose from (hot, oldest, newest, best). with default being hot. It also hosts mini profiles per user on its website and has an aggregated page for all comments on the blog. They also host forums on the website which could be configured to display blog posts as per the recency and hotness. I could host independent posts on forum as well, but i do not see many using it this way.  Given that they are still building their product, i am optimistic about its final offering.

Intense Debate is one of the first TechStars graduates to appear on scene. TechStars blog is running on intense debate. They support Movable Type, Wordpress and recently Blogger. Apart from usual ratings and  reputations, they offer most impressive usability features like expanding and collapsing nested comments etc, and the icing on cake is their comments RSS feed. They are currently in their beta-ish mode. If you worry about your existing comment repository, then they have an answer for that as well. They support migration of comments back and forth between wordpress and their hosted environment, which will address all the legacy reasons for not adopting a comenting system.  

Js-Kit has been around for some time now. They offers a set of useful widgets which includes ratings, polls, comments, top rated. Instead of offering a feature fat single option, their offering is pretty affable. It is appealing for i-dont-want-all-but-some class of users. This swiss knife is astonishingly easy to use, as easy as inserting a line of code in your pages. When it comes to improving your favourite home brewed blog, then Js-kit is the choice. Classic example of simplicity still rules.  

Concluding, SezWho scores for their contextual reputation, Intense Debate scores for the better usability, Js-Kit scores for simplicity and flexibility. Disqus is still not available publically, but has a combination of good usability features, and forums.

They have offered us a bouquet of roses, but still you need to have an account with every one of them. Also, your Disqus reputation is not visible on the Intense Debate enabled blogs and vice versa. But given the infacy of the concept itself, it is too early to dream for this. With time, i hope they build some standards, and expose their API’s to provide interoperability, which will lead to better blogging environment.