Suddenly blog commenting is a hot space
November 1 Mike Butcher
It appears a lot of people want to get into the blog comment space in the US. SezWho has raised a $1 million series A round from KPG Ventures, which makes it the best funded of the small group of startups currently trying to leverage the community for commenters. SezWho joins Disqus and Intense Debate, among others, to recently launch.
SezWho doesn’t wrap a social network around comments, but adds ratings and reputations to blog comments via Wordpress and MovableType plug-ins. So far it has 300 sites using its system. It also has a “Red Carpet” widget that highlights a site’s top rated commentors to encourage more participation. Readers can sort the comments based on these ratings. The idea is to drive traffic across all SezWho enabled blogs, thus incentivising the blog to install the widget.
Disqus is a javascript embed or blog plug-in (Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType) that enhances blog comments and integrates it with a fully moderated community forum. Then there’s Tangler, another commenting system attached to forums. And CoComment recently landed itself in London to throw a drinks party in an attempt to sell its service into bigger sites.
Meanwhile the tiny UK-based fav.or.it - yes, those guys with the impossible to type name - are still prepping their site while juggling chats with potential investors. Fav.or.it will have a multi-faceted service but more importantly it will aggregate comments and send them back through the standard technologies already available. The plug-in services, like Disqus et al, are more likely - by contrast - to fragment blog comments and leave everyone with non-standard blogs.
It’s going to be interesting to see how all this plays out. Who knew simple old blog comments would come to this?
June 18th, 2008 at 8:44 am
June 18th, 2008 at 8:58 am
June 18th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
June 18th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Comments
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:34 am
Khris Loux from js-kit will be speaking at Widgety Goodness. js-kit do comments and ratings etc as widgets. What’s interesting to me is that you can connect comments for your site to your Googlejuice, although the comments are on their server. How cool is that?
November 2nd, 2007 at 4:22 am
Hey Mike, thanks for mentioning Intense Debate. If you have any questions or feedback on our service feel free to drop me a line anytime (josh at intensedebate.com).
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:45 am
I participate in a lot of forums and leave comments on different sites. It’d be great if I could somehow track all of my comments, see any responses, follow the trails etc, all from one site. I’m not sure if the companies in the post do this. I could see mybloglog expanding to this space quite easily given the information they have already.
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:56 am
I’d refuse to use anything that is not totally open. I think Shafqat above touches on a really useful app though.
November 2nd, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Hey Mike,
Thanks for mentioning cocomment. The UK party was a lot of fun and very productive. We also hosted parties in Paris and Munich the same week.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
You can reach me at joaquin@cocomment.com
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Just to demonstrate how fav.or.it it works, this comment is being sent from within the feed reader, I didnt need to leave it to comment, or fill in any forms. So thanks for the mention Mike.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID2394]
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:21 pm
@ nick h - ah - almost as good as email then
November 4th, 2007 at 2:47 am
Thanks for the blurb, Mike. We’re all doing some fun stuff around web discussions, so it should be good times.
Btw, a note about openness. We have API docs available that we are still refining. We’d be happy to work closer with other folks - shoot me an email: daniel@disqus.com
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:36 am
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