Social Commenting Systems
There are a number of new social commenting systems becoming available. These services are in kind of a weird space. After all, every blog already has a built in commenting system. How do you benefit from using one of these services and “outsourcing” your comment system? Traditionally commenting has been a pretty one way experience. The comments are reactionary to the post. Built in commenting systems don’t allow much community interaction. It is difficult to reply directly to another commenter and continually monitor the ongoing conversation. Disqus, Intense Debate, coComment, and SezWho are all trying to change this. There are some benefits to using one of these systems: better comment threading to enhance and simplify discussion, ability to use avatars and video comments, a voting system for commenters to build their reputation, and the ability to easily follow commenters across multiple sites. The biggest benefits I see, are to the commenters themselves. A system like this helps commenters “own” the content they create. Often times, the comments on a blog are more interesting than the post itself. Built in commenting systems do little to reward commenters for the content. These commenting systems make it much easier for commenters to build their personal brands through reputation, gain followers, and aggregate their comments from all over the web onto a centralized service.
I would, however, like to see these four services rally around an open standard. The ultimate goal is to have the comments for all blogs to be centralized to one service. Having four services would be better than thousands of built in ones, but not quite ideal. Some merging or standard would definitely be better for the web community.
I really think that if you respect your blog’s community, you owe it to them to use one of these services. We are now using Disqus for our commenting (incredibly easy to install). See below for my sample comment. Let us know what you think.
Last 3 posts by Justin Thiele
- Filtrbox for Monitoring Your Brand on the Web - August 18th, 2008
- Name This: The Crowdsourced Naming Agency - August 1st, 2008
- Yahoo! Pipes for Fun and Profit! - June 9th, 2008
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