This is an argument that is probably as old as the first comment left on a web forum or posted to a NNTP newsgroup and hasn’t gotten any clearer as we move into the Facebook world of social media. In fact many are suggesting that the forced use of real names predisposes people to leave better comments and is the idea being pushed by services like Facebook, and a growing number of blogs.

Well, it turns out that this might not be the case if a study by Disqus, a third party commenting system used on a very large number of blogs and other sites, holds any water.

The company analyzed nearly 500,000 comments that had been made on its platform and found that contrary to popular perception, and Facebook PR, those people that used nicknames, or pseudonyms, are responsible for some of the highest quality; and number, of comments on the web.

“The average commenter using a pseudonym contributed 6.5 times more than anonymous commenters and 4.7 times more than commenters identifying with Facebook,” Disqus said.

These partially veiled commenters are also soliciting more “likes” and replies — positive quality signals, according to Disqus — than their anonymous and real name counterparts. Sixty-one percent of comments made by people using pseudonyms showed positive quality signals, while 51 percent of comments from those using their real names and 34 percent from the anonymous types possessed positive quality signals.

via VentureBeat

Now Jennifer Van Grove was quick to point out in her VentureBeat post that because Disqus was a commenting platform and in direct competition with Facebook that was in their best interests to paint the information in a favorable light.

New data suggests that readers using pseudonyms are leaving better comments is a post from: The Inquisitr

As of a few hours ago, comments here on The Inquisitr are powered by JS-Kit’s new Echo commenting and social aggregation service.

It’s not without a little bit of irony that after criticizing JS-Kit last year that they’re now supplying our comment platform. JS-Kit this time last year was a company that tended to lash out at competitors, something I still believe was unbecoming of a company that at its core is a community player in the social media scene. 12 months though is a long time, and JS-Kit has changed its tune and instead relies on innovation and selling itself to the market without attacking others in the space today.

Why change?

We’ve been mostly happy users of Disqus since very early on in The Inquisitr’s history. It was, and still is a good platform for comments. However there has been issues, particularly relating to spam. For weeks now I’ve had to spend time every morning deleting spam, blocking and marking it as I go, but it still got through. Spam is an issue on any site, but unfortunately Disqus has been doing a sub-standard job in picking it up. It wasn’t an issue with just The Inquisitr; other Disqus users I’ve spoken to confirmed that spam on Disqus is getting out of hand.

We looked at reverting back to native WordPress comments, however I’m still fond of the idea behind Disqus, IntenseDebate and JS-Kit: centralized comments, multiple comment options, and social service aggregation. Then JS-Kit’s Echo came along.

Echo offers a range of advantages over the competition, in particular live updating (good ol’ “Real Time Web”), additional aggregation options, and more depth in supported services. It’s an appealing package, and there’s only one way to test it, and that’s by using it.

So far, so good. We need to tweak the appearance on the page, but notably JS-Kit has placed spam missed by Disqus into moderation, and that’s got to be a good sign.

My thanks to Daniel Ha at Disqus for his previous assistance. Disqus still has a lot of potential, but I can’t help but think that Disqus is going through some growing pains at the moment. Competition is always good, and I hope Disqus get through the issues and go on to bigger and better things.

My thanks also to Chris Saad and Alex Peshkov at JS-Kit for setting Echo up for us.

Why we’re giving JS-Kit’s Echo a shot is a post from: The Inquisitr

In the biggest shakeup to hit the commenting 2.0 space so far, JS-Kit has announced the acquisition of rival SezWho.

The acquisition was made after SezWho was unable to raise a new round needed to continue operations.

Under the deal, SezWho will close down in 30 days, with publishers being offered the ability to transition to JS-Kit’s commenting platform. JS-Kit previously acquired smaller player Haloscan in July 2008, and signed a strategic partnership with coCommen in November.

The acquisition cements JS-Kit’s place as the largest commenting 2.0 provider, and offers further strength in its battle against the Automattic owned IntenseDebate, and the still independent Disqus.

And then there was three: JS-Kit acquires SezWho is a post from: The Inquisitr

Commenting 2.0 service Disqus has landed Mashable as a client, with a new offering that incorporates social media tracking for the first time.

Mashable adds exposure to 2.4 million readers on 5.2 million page views to the Disqus network (stats per Quantcast.) Disqus hasn’t been as aggressive as its competitors in acquiring site signups, so this is a much welcomed boost.

Mashable’s rollout of Disqus though isn’t a standard install. Disqus has teamed up with closed beta conversation tracker UberVU to deliver social media reactions into the comment area.

According to Disqus:

If Mashable’s posts are discussed on Twitter or Digg, those tweets and comments will appear in their Disqus powered comment system. Other supported services include Flickr, FriendFeed, YouTube, and many more.

Pete Cashmore writes on Mashable that the system isn’t perfect yet, and that ideally it will eventually include the ability to post back to these services.

Disqus lands Mashable, adds social tracking is a post from: The Inquisitr

Commenting 2.0 service Disqus has announced support for FriendFeed, allowing users to natively import FriendFeed comments into Disqus.

The integration between the two popular services has been the top of many users’ list for over a year, and while WordPress plugins, and more lately a hosted service promised some levels of integration, you can’t beat native support.

To set up Disqus to import FriendFeed comments, users need to go into account/ services and enter their FriendFeed name and key. Following that, it’s as simple as ticking a box in admin/ settings.

One of the core reasons I’ve flirted with rival commenting 2.0 service IntenseDebate was FriendFeed support; IntenseDebate offered it without the hassle, perfect for our funny pics blog Inquisitr.com/extra. With FriendFeed support in Disqus, I’m likely to switch back, although there’s still one last request: native WordPress handling of comments

Finally, Disqus gets native FriendFeed support is a post from: The Inquisitr

There’s nothing worse as a blog owner to discover that your site isn’t loading properly. Saturday night at 10pm my time (3am PST Saturday) just before I was going to switch off for the night, The Inquisitr started doing funny things, like not loading the front page. I fired up Firebug to troubleshoot, and quickly discovered the issue was one of the Disqus widgets we had in the sidebar.

Disqus has experienced some downtime this year. Bloggers using a local install of WordPress and running the API plugin don’t have much to fear: comments revert to native WordPress comments when Disqus is down. Someone asked me this week if we’d dumped Disqus because one recent post wasn’t showing Disqus, so they were down at some stage earlier in the week as well. But that’s great if you’re only using Disqus for commenting: if you’re running widgets from Disqus there’s no fall back; if they don’t load, they stop everything past that point, as they did with The Inquisitr Saturday. The answer of course is to not run Disqus widgets, but we’ll get to that in a second.

Whether it was Disqus alone with issues I’m not sure. Ripping out the Disqus widgets caused more of the site to load, and then Outbrain was slowing things down a lot, so both may share a data center. I checked the one site I knew was running both: LouisGray.com and it was having the same issues. Our Technorati Engage 125px units also started throwing errors, so they’re still down today, along with FriendFeed integration.

I pinged Louis and his wise advice was that sometimes sites have outages, and it was the middle of then night so it wasn’t an issue for him. He’s right about it happening, but I don’t have to like it. For a 2 hour period we had only 200 visitors when we’d usually have 2000-4000, so it hurt.

In my anger I started shopping around for a Disqus alternative. SezWho and Intense Debate were the two sites I hit (JS-Kit is another service), and I decided to play with Intense Debate; it’s a small thing but Intense Debate offers far more information on their service than SezWho does, and it was the selling point.

I briefly ran Intense Debate here on The Inquisitr before switching Disqus back on once the issues had passed. Disqus is still running as I write this post, but I won’t commit long term to keeping it this way. Here’s why I nearly switched, and why I might yet.

Intense Debate For

Integrated WordPress commenting: no iFrame for Intense Debate, instead all comments are shown natively in WordPress. It’s an “advanced” view that delivers Intense Debate services in the one spot. Disqus by comparison has a highly confused interface: for example you don’t have all moderation features in their admin view, but you do on the post itself. In WordPress you get an iFrame.

Integrated FriendFeed comments: if I switch this will be a big selling point. Intense Debate imports FriendFeed comments into the comment thread itself, so they just look like standard comments. We’ve previously been running them here at The Inquisitr, but they aren’t combined in the comment thread. Disqus has previously talked about doing this, but they don’t do it today that I’m aware of.

Integrated Twitter support: not a huge selling point, but at a time where Twitter has never been more popular, the option to allow users to Tweet their comment complete with link can only help drive traffic back to your site. Disqus doesn’t offer anything similar.

Reputation Management: Both offer reputation management, but with Intense Debate it’s a stronger part of the presentation.

Disqus for

Better looks on site: You can customize CSS with Intense Debate embeds, but out of the box I prefer Disqus for looks. Intense Debate was more imposing on the page, from aggresive feature boxes through to a big “powered by Intense Debate” line at the base of the comments.

Bugs: One of the reasons I didn’t stick with Intense Debate was bugs; I’d swapped out Disqus due to server issues on their end, but the Intense Debate code caused local issues with their plugin and code base. I jumped on their support forums and others had reported issues as well. Better still, at the time of writing Intense Debate doesn’t support WordPress 2.7, which is all the more bizarre when you consider it’s owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress itself.

Community: The biggest reason I’m sticking with Disqus for the time being. I’m sure Intense Debate has a reasonable community, but I know among our regular readers that many have Disqus accounts. I also know many others sites we link to and share with run Disqus as well. Community is THE KEY selling point to Disqus, it was one of the reasons I cited when we signed up, it’s a key reason why using Disqus has driven comment growth here, and dumping Disqus risks the inverse effect of costing us commenters, and it’s a gamble I’d rather not make, at least now.

Better Widgets: when they work, Disqus widgets integrate better on blogs, and I use two of them for that very reason. The widgets for Intense Debate felt clunky, didn’t integrate well, and needed hacking for better looks. Lazy perhaps, but Disqus is better out of the box.

Underdog: I like supporting Disqus because they are a small, independent startup, and it helps that CEO Daniel Ha is a great bloke who can’t do enough to help you when you get stuck (well accept in the middle of the night naturally ). Intense Debate is an Automattic service, a big company with a near monopoly on self hosted blogs. Competition is best encouraged by supporting (within reason) the little guy.

Conclusion

As much as I’ll never get my lost sleep back from Saturday night (the light went out at 3am) my annoyance with Disqus gave me the opportunity to seriously look at Intense Debate, and I’m grateful that I did. It’s an impressive service, with many strong selling points. Competition in the market drives players to continually improve their service and features, and Disqus can easily improve in a number of areas based on what Intense Debate is doing. Disqus has my business for now, but that business could be snatched away in the future should a competitor be able to mount a strong enough reason to switch.

If you’re starting a new blog, or haven’t joined the commenting 2.0 revolution, you should have Intense Debate on your list. The switching path is easier than Disqus, and you could do far worse.

Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched is a post from: The Inquisitr

 

Ever feel like you are suddenly standing in a pool of quicksand and there is nothing that you can do to get out of it?

Lately this is how social media has felt like. From both as a blogger and as a consumer. Services that are suppose to make things easier only seem to be muddying the waters. Distractions become almost the norm as we flit from one service to another and then try and pull them altogether with some sort of aggregator.

There is this underlying pressure to be a part of conversations, to create new conversations. It wasn’t so hard when all we had to do was remember what blogs we might have left comments on. Now though our blog comments are being spread all over with services like Disqus or IntenseDebate; which are then pulled in – or not pulled into – aggregrators like FriendFeed or Strands.

Where do we go now to be a part of conversations or to start new ones. We have Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, blogs or again the aggregators with their inline comments. We are becoming a quagmire of conversations into which now we have Google and Facebook throwing their immense weight.

All this is suppose to be under the guise of data portability but all I am seeing is a mish-mash of disjointed conversations. Am I talking to you on a blog or on Facebook or on FriendFeed? Or how about Twitter or the Strands or – well you pick the spot because I am sure there is aconversation going there as well.

The further we go along this road of ubiquitous conversations it all feels like it is becoming more like white noise. We all seem to be turning into nothing more than talking points in some-one else’s marketing or brand promotion. We comment on one site and the next thing we know those comments could end up on Facebook. It could end up on some Google Friend Wall or sitting in some aggregator. We are getting lost in our own conversation jungle.

From the blogger’s point of view it is a mass confusion of what services to we use? We stare nervously at new join forms wondering if we should maybe join some other service instead of this one. Which one is going to be better to promote our brand on? which one is going to have more reach? Which one will be the winner and what happens if I invest my time in the wrong one?

From the consumer side it becomes a question of how many of these services do I need to join so I don’t miss anything? How many conversations can I be a part of at any one time? How many browser tabs can I really monitor so that I don’t miss anything?

It is beginning to feel like we are just having conversations for converstaion sake – to make some noise – to fill up that immense space of the Internet with noise. It is all becoming a matter of hyper-conversation. Conversations on as many services as possible with as many people as possible. We are drowning in conversations but is anybody really talking?

Conversations seem to have become disjointed words being spread far and wide. There doesn’t seem to be any bottom to touch our feet to as we swim through this sea of conversations. A sea that is only getting bigger as each day goes by and we are getting further from the shore.

I wonder if at some point this whole world of hyper-conversations won’t begin to collapse in on itself. I know that technology and the Internet is changing how we percieve and deal with our world. I know that it is changing us as human beings and I’m okay with that – in fact I think it is great thing. But we are not processors living the life of Moore’s Law. We do have finite edges of tolerance to what our minds can absorb and logically deal with.

This isn’t about turning back time or putting the genie back in the bottle; because that is impossible and really – I wouldn’t want to. I just wonder if during this process of shaping new landscapes we aren’t getting caught up in a trap. Do we really need to be everywhere having conversations? Do we really need to be the unwitting shills for other peoples brands and marketing jive?

Do we really need to get ourselves trapped in the quicksand of hyper-conversations?

Is social media becoming a social mess? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Blog ratings and recommendation service Outbrain has launched their first integration with commenting 2.0 service Disqus.

With the first release, links to Disqus comments will now be offered as standard to users who use both services. In the wild, the addition includes a link on the word comments.

To access the feature, users don’t need to upgrade their Outbrain plugin, as the link will be automatically provided (it’s not on The Inquisitr yet because we don’t run a standard externally served version of Outbrain, but it will eventually be here).

John LoGioco writes on the Outbrain blog that “In many cases the position of the outbrain rater at the footer of each post lifts the Disqus comment link higher than the standard Disqus integration which should be a good thing.”

The integration is a first step for Outbrain, who have been talking about tie-ins with Disqus for some time. Both companies offer complimentary services, and in the battle for users, cross promotional deals like this help drive better products for users.

Disclosure: we run both services, but we have no financial arrangements with either company.

Outbrain offers Disqus integration is a post from: The Inquisitr

The AOL owned Userplane offers a variety of free and premium publisher tools, including message boards, chat, AIR applications and multimedia tools.

Userplane will offer JS-Kit’s Ratings service through Userplane’s distribution channels. JS-Kit will add Userplane’s Webchat application to its product offering. Combined the two companies will have a reach of over 900,000 registered publishers.

And so the battle for numbers continues in this space. JS-Kit announced $3.6 million in new funding October 14.

JS-Kit lands Userplane deal is a post from: The Inquisitr

New SezWho functionality includes four new profile templates, including support for popular threaded discussion formats. More importantly for site owners, SezWho now offers support for local CSS and JavaScript. Other new features include Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down ratings for posts, configurable pop-ups, improved support for filtering, support for multiple WordPress installations in a single database, and easier upgrading.

SezWho has also announced a new partnership with Instablogs, that will see SezWho bring reputation management and universal profiles and content to Instablog readers. Instablogs’ readers can now rate posts and user-generated content on Instablogs and across other SezWho-enabled social media sites, including blogs, discussion forums, and bulletin boards.

The new features will be a welcome addition to SezWho users, and help the service define itself in a competitive space. The deal with Instablogs sees SezWho now powering a number of leading blog networks, including Creative Webloging.

SezWho announces enhanced features, new partnership with Instablogs is a post from: The Inquisitr

JS-Kit said it would use the new round to expand its developer and executive team. The first hiring is Chris Saad, founder of Faraday Media (Particls) and the Co-Founder of the DataPortability Project.

Its money at the right time for JS-Kit, as the worst of the economic crisis is yet to fully understood in terms of direct impact on the sector. JS-Kit is well positioned compared to some competitors, offering a variety of site specific widgets on top of its commenting 2.0 service.

We’ve not been a huge fan of JS-Kit in the past. The company felt it necessary to trash talk their opponents when they acquired Haloscan in July, and a constant need to attack your competition in my books says more about the company making the attacks then it does about the target. Saad will add some charisma to the mix, and despite his young age, some reasonable street smarts in the PR 101 playbook.

JS-Kit gets $3.6 million, Chris Saad is a post from: The Inquisitr

The API itself has been is use for sometime, with an official WordPress plugin using the API instead of javascript to deliver SEO friendly commenting on WordPress blogs. We’ve been using the API plugin from the day with started using Disqus, and we have no complaints.

CEO Daniel Ha notes that developers can use the API to create import tools, export tools, or even a custom Disqus plugin for any platforms. This will allow users to create Disqus tools and plugins on platforms such as up and coming blogging platfrom Habari.

It’s a positive step forward for Disqus in the ongoing battle for users currently taking place between services in this space including JS-Kit, SezWho and the now Automattic owned Intense Debate.

Full documentation of the Disqus API can be found here.

Disqus releases a full public API is a post from: The Inquisitr

Voxant offers licensed videos from media outlets, including AP for use on websites. For bloggers the service also offers $7 CPM on ads shown with the videos, and attractive offering (we use them on occasion), although their catalog is not as extensive as competitor Clipsyndicate. Depending on the report, Voxant was either acquired or merged with Anystream, a provider of video encoding and content management to media companies including CNN and Sky. Financial details were not disclosed, but the statement from Anystream notes that the combined product will offer more content and become a leading playing the space.

Commenting 2.0 service Intense Debate, a competitor of Disqus, SezWho and JS-Kit but not widely used as it hasn’t yet launched (it’s still in closed beta) was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Mashable reports that the deal will see Intense Debate rolled out across millions of blogs on the WordPress.com network, delivering the service a massive boost at a time all competitors are looking for more users.

Deals: Voxant, Intense Debate change hands is a post from: The Inquisitr

b5media’s entertainment blogs have long been the backbone of the network in terms of traffic, delivering millions of pages views by targeting niche verticals, such as dedicating blogs to specific stars and shows as opposed to offering one central blog. The network recently launched Starked.com as a portal for the entertainment sites and branding exercise for the blogs.

For SezWho, the b5media deal follows similar deals with Entrecard, Creative Weblogging and Izea in July and continues the arms race of numbers in the space where the various competitors are seeking to become the default commenting 2.0 service by having the biggest install base. In terms of exposure, the deal will expose SezWho to potentially millions of new users, although I am surprised the deal didn’t extend to b5media’s full network; perhaps it’s a try before they fully buy deal.

Disclosure: I am a founder of b5media, although I have no relationship with the company today, nor did I discuss this post with anyone within b5media prior to publication.

SezWho lands b5media entertainment blogs is a post from: The Inquisitr

The simple to use service starts by asking users for some examples of sites they comment on, then cleverly goes looking for other sites. The process isn’t perfect, for example even with my relatively obscure name it still managed to find a comment from another Duncan Riley (there were 14 on the planet the last time I counted) but it is 95% or more accurate, and removing eronous matches is as easy as clicking on a false or spam option.

The obvious parallels are to coComment and Disqus. coComment was the first to offer centralized comment tracking, creating a community around comments. Disqus recently launched a comment blog function where you can share your comments in a dedicated space. Both rely on an install base either on site or in browser, so cannot act independently, where as Backtype needs neither. Backtype feels a little FriendFeed like, complete with the ability to follow people and have comments streamed, and the obvious aside is whether as a standalone idea Backtype works when FriendFeed itself offers support for comments, be it limited in scope compared to Backtype.

Louis Gray is hot on the idea, saying that if you like the idea of a comment blog, you’ll like Backtype, which is a fair call, but any of these services ultimately rely on community, and it’s far too early to make a call in that direction. There is some social aspects, such as the ability to share, but the ability to connect and comment inline (as is offered by Disqus) is lacking, so there is a stickiness quotient missing. The flip though to that is that the reply option goes straight to the originating site, so it could easily become a traffic driver as well. One to watch.

Backtype: coComment 2.0? is a post from: The Inquisitr

I upgraded to the new plugin and all seemed fine, and then I noticed that posts here at The Inquisitr were not appearing in FriendFeed. I have the manual refresh greasemonkey script installed, and no matter how many times I tried to refresh my feeds, nothing was coming in after hours of trying. It may not seem a big deal, but we incorporate FriendFeed comments here on The Inquisitr, so if items aren’t hitting FriendFeed, they are missing out on comments, and I strongly value the FriendFeed communities feedback and opinions.

At 12:11pm AEST (7:11pm PDT) I sent FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit an email, asking if he was able to take a look, or if not could he forward the issue to someone who could (I don’t have a list of FriendFeed employees, but I’m guessing they have customer help people). 2:16pm I receive a response saying that my feed contains invalid XML, with a highlighted example, and a note saying “Sorry for the troubles — we need to get better at reflecting feed errors in the UI.” Being at a loss as to what might be causing the issue, I turned to FriendFeed, asking simply

“need some help if anyone knows XML + feeds. Email from Paul Buchheit saying The Inquisitr’s feed is invalid because it includes < links.length but I have no idea why WP or Feedburner would start doing this. Anyone have any ideas?”

Shortly there after Tim Hoeck responds suggesting that it might be Disqus related. 2:28pm I email Disqus CEO Daniel Ha, noting the invalid code and pointing him to the FriendFeed entry. A little later I forward him Paul’s email thinking that it might help. 2:44pm email from Daniel: “I’ll investigate to see if this is an issue on our end. Sorry for any inconvenience. I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything out.” 3:11pm “We figured out the issue and will be updating the plugin shortly. Sorry about the inconvenience, Duncan.” 3:27pm “The fix is in the newest package of the plugin.” In between times Paul Buchheit emails me to let me know that he’s pinged Disqus “I emailed Disqus just in case it’s related to their new release. Also, I’ve updated our blog feed parser to be more tolerant of errors, so your feed should start updating again.” End result, in a little over an hour after identifying the source of the problem, it was fixed, roughly 3 hours if we count the first email. No matter what the time, super quick.

The bug in Disqus’ code was a little annoying, but the customer service was second to none. Same for FriendFeed, they were happy to help and not buck pass internally on the issue, and even went out of their way to contact Disqus as well without being asked.

It may sound a little corny, but this is why I’m happy to lend my support to both companies. Far too often is the end user forgotten as services grow big, and the personal touch is lost, but both continue to maintain a responsiveness that places them ahead of their peers. They understand, when many others don’t, that every customer counts and every customer is important. Once again, Disqus and FriendFeed rock.

(img credit: cmercier)

Disqus and FriendFeed Rock Again [Good Customer Service] is a post from: The Inquisitr

One of the most common arguments against using Disqus has been the hosted nature of the service, with comments residing on Disqus alone without a local copy. The new Disqus confronts the criticism head on, by offering a new API driven WordPress plugin that stores comments locally as well as on Disqus itself. The feature allows users to try Disqus at any time then leave the service without every having to worry about comment storage. Disqus CEO Daniel Ha tells me that there is has been a great emphasis in the new version of making sure that comments on each blog can be seen by search engines, delivering a completely SEO friendly package.

The new Disqus offers automatic data sync between Disqus and the local database so blogs are never out of date, seamless import/export of old and new comments allowing users to embrace Disqus in full on existing blogs, and the ability to moderate comments from within WordPress itself.

The Disqus site has undergone a large reorganization and redesign to be more intuitive, useful, and accessible. Users now have immediate access to their (and friends) comments to track and manage the discussion.

In the added or improved list includes adding moderators, setting permissions, block lists and comment system configuration.

In an interesting new offering, user profiles can now act as comment blogs. Comments are displayed as blog entries with appropriate context so people can share their contributions on other sites with friends and fans.

Disqus has found strong support in a competitive market that includes Sezwho, Intense Debate and JS-Kit. Disqus is now used on over 30,000 sites, and Ha believes that with the new features and emphasis on a strong API and local data retention that this figure will continue to grow.

The last excuse for you not to try Disqus has just been hit on the head.

Disqus responds to critics: local comment hosting is a post from: The Inquisitr

Entrecard’s blog ad network has added SezWho as a way to reward bloggers who participate on the site. Bloggers whose SezWho comments receive high ratings through SezWho will receive Entrecard credits to be spent on advertisements within the 14,000 strong Entrecard advertising network.

Blog network Creative Weblogging will offer SezWho reputation-driven user profiles across its network, and Izea will use SezWho to power its SocialSpark Solution Center.

The commenting 2.0 space has turned into a numbers race as the various players look to increase their presence. These three deals give SezWho a serious leg up against rivals including Intense Debate and Disqus. There is room for multiple players in the space, but the service with more eyeballs will ultimately come out on top, and perhaps go on to become the Google of the 2.0 commenting space. Expect more deals like these in the coming months.

SezWho Signs Deals with Entrecard, Creative Weblogging and Izea is a post from: The Inquisitr

JS-Kit isn’t often collectively bundled with the Disqus, Sezwho and Intense Debate as its commenting tools are offered along side a range of other inline blogging tools, including polls, ratings (placing it against Outbrain) and some in-blog referral tools. The move to acquire Haloscan would seeminly indicate that JS-Kit is getting more serious about its commenting platform at a time the 2.0 commenting market is heating up.

Venturebeat (also source on the news here) reports that JS-Kit took the opportunity to trash talk Disqus, saying that “Disqus hosts comments on its own servers and site and in so doing, takes away all the benefits that comments could have on a blog’s search engine ranking.” While Disqus does hosts comments on its own servers, comments can be seen in search engines when users use the API based plugin, one of the biggest selling points for me when I decided to go with Disqus to power comments on this blog.

But why the need for trash talk at all? Isn’t one of the 2.0 fundamentals that we can all get along?

I know when I considered joining a 2.0 comment service that one of the things that impressed me immensely (and it still does) about Disqus was not only Disqus founder Daniel Ha’s commitment to reaching out to me during the consideration process, but also his ability to respond to my concerns with positive responses about his own product without the need to belittle competing products in the process. I’ve also seen Daniel respond continually when criticism has arisen by embracing the criticism and challenging himself (and Disqus) to do better. The product isn’t perfect, and yes, there is always room for improvement, but Disqus continues to grow for the better, while being trasnsparent, open and friendly in the broader space. I can even remember Sezwho trash talking Disqus, and Daniel responded with an open invite to Sezwho on possible interoperability and never once denigrated Sezwho in return (that I’m aware of).

As competition between personal services in this space continues, and when the feature set from one service to the next is fairly close, I know I’m more likely to consider a service provider when and where they are positive players in the space, selling the merits of their service based on their service, without trash talking others. This may not always be the case (particularly for large, non-blog related services), but if I’m putting a service on a blog I own, it’s something that makes a great selling point for me, and as I talk to others, I hear similar positions as well.

JS-Kit acquires HaloScan, but why trash talk Disqus? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The API version of the plugin, unlike the more commonly used Javascript version, renders text on a blog so that it can be seen by search engines, one of the main selling points for those who like the idea of using a service such as Disqus, but don’t want to lose the SEO benefits of a vibrant comment thread.

The new version is officially an “interim release” so it may have bugs (consider it a beta), but I’ve just installed it here at The Inquisitr to see how it works. The biggest reason to update: support for Seesmic commenting, a feature that has been available on the javascript version for quite some time.

Those interested can download the plugin here. Note as above: it’s offered caveat emptor, so if you experience any serious issues, be prepared to flip back to the earlier, official API release. Also Disqus CEO Daniel Ha asks that if you do spot any bugs, to let him know.

Disqus Updates WordPress API Plugin, Now Supports Seesmic is a post from: The Inquisitr