It’s been an interesting 24 hours for the blog comments business.
Yesterday, Intense Debate opened up in public beta. It is a new service that replaces your blog’s standard commenting system with an enhanced version that features analytics, user profiles, and a tracking system. The company reached out to us and we look forward to talking about their story soon.
Disqus, pronounced “discuss,” is also striving to improve the world of commenting for both users and blog creators and brings the conversation into a more forum-like discussion that can expand beyond the original blog post. It too opened in public beta yesterday.
Now we officially have a three-fer here with SezWho’s announcement today that it is rolling our an entirely new set of social features and statistics.
We use SezWho, the rev before the new announcement, in our comments section and we like it. We’re actually working on embedding the new features as I type this post.
SezWho is a collaborative review and reputation service that informs and improves conversations across distributed social spaces. It supports blogs, forums, social networks, wikis – any site that features user-generated content.
Next to each comment is a simple question: “Was this comment useful to you?” A cumulative ranking is then associated with each comment, which collectively provides an overall score associated with individual profiles. SezWho lets reviewers take their reputation and reviews with them wherever they participate on the web, offering a snapshot of their expertise and knowledge throughout all SezWho-enabled sites.
So what’s new?
The company announced a series of new features to enhance the online community experience and elevate conversations among participants.
Among the new community enhancing features, SezWho introduced two new widgets.
The Red Carpet widget lets communities feature top-rated participants on a virtual red carpet. Each avatar links to individual profiles that provide a history of comments, associated articles or pages, and the overall ranking for each. Similar in concept to the MyBlogLog widget, but instead of showing a list of recent readers, Red Carpet shows a list of recent commenters with links to past comments and their rankings.
The new SezWho badge lets contributors proudly display their earned personal rating and expertise portfolio on their blogs or other sites to reinforce an earned reputation.
Beyond tracking conversations and the value of individual contributions, the latest SezWho release also provides statistics for both contributors and site owners. Contributor statistics show who and how many people are rating and viewing a contributor’s profile. Site statistics show how much additional traffic SezWho is driving and where that traffic is coming from.
The company also raised $1 million Series A from KPG Ventures in its first round of funding.
Since the launch of the SezWho beta site in June 2007, the service has been installed on over 300 sites, with more than 100,000 active users. According to the company, the funding will be used to accelerate SezWho’s growth and the continued development of tools and services to facilitate and enhance community-based conversations.
sezwho disqus intensedebate intense+debate comments social+media wikis blogs social media kpg ventures
