comments Archive

The blog commenting space continues to heat up. Disqus, IntenseDebate, JS-Kit and SezWho are all trying a variety of different techniques to attempt to win over the market. Of the companies listed above, only SezWho isn’t a comment replacement service. Rather, SezWho provides a social layer on top of the commenting service you are already using.

Today SezWho is out with three new partnerships to help increase distribution of their social commenting layer application. The partnerships include: Izea’s SocialSpark, Entrecard and Creative Weblogging. These companies have mainstream appeal and these distribution partnerships should help the take rate for the SezWho service.

SocialSpark is basically the new name for PayPerPost and you can check out a video demo of the service by Izea CEO Ted Murphy. Ted claims they have 190,000 registered bloggers (no info on actives) and those bloggers will have the ability to add SezWho into their blogs.

Entrecard is a advertising swap service that is popular with making money and search engine optimizer blogs. By installing the SezWho service on an Entrecard-enabled blog, the blog author can receive credits to use in future ad swaps. Last month they made a change to remove quick drop pages from the service.

When I spoke last week with JS-Kit founder Khris Loux, he spoke about the importance of scale in this new comment service business. SezWho claims that these deals will help reach over 200,000 new bloggers. The company also notes that they track 2.5 million pieces of content.

Check out our interview with SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta to learn more about how the SezWho service works.

Someone once told me that you will have arrived when your company receives its first lawsuit threat. If that’s true, Disqus has arrived. We wrote about Disqus, a blog commenting system, upon their launch last month. I’m starting to see more and more blogs incorporating the Disqus system which is a good sign for co-founder Daniel Ha.

This evening Daniel has a post explaining their first lawsuit threat. I am assuming that Disqus only acts as a content repository and that the content within your repository is your own and Disqus claims no responsibility. He calls upon Title 47, Section 230 of the U.S. Code with respect to the complaint.

The complaint includes:

I am the President of a big European company. I will put unlimited funds in trying to get this profile down. You can chose to work with me or face the consequences in a court of Law both in Europe and in the US. I am very sorry that you have declined my request to remove the slander statements about me on your website. I strongly urge you to study the slander and defamation laws in both U.K, Sweden and United States. You might also want to talk to your lawyers about a libel cases especially in the US.

Legal Actions will be taken against you and your company both in Europe and The United States on Wednesday. We will ask for a jury trial.

The part I am not sure about is what procedures does Disqus have in place to deal with these types of complaints. How do they notify the site owner, etc.  If they don’t already have these policies, it’s probably time to create them and post them publicly.

On a funny note, could you just imagine the cast of characters at a Web 2.0 trial? Your honor I’d like to call Robert Scoble. In walks Scoble with a whiteboard to draw the events while people are chatting on Kyte. Next up is Justine who allows her viewers to watch the courtroom through her eyes and every 30 seconds we get an Xtrain commercial. Last up is Jason Calacanis who explains that he likes that the courts still use humans to decide one’s fate and not some algorithym because humans do things better. On breaks, everyone pulls out their iPhone and Twitters the past period’s events.

Daniel ends the explanation with, "we’re not too concerned, but I wanted to take this opportunity to clarify: Disqus makes no claim on your comment content and we take great care to make sure we don’t overstep any bounds. "

This column is a reply to a post by Jason Calacanis about Bankruptcy.

From what I can tell, it seems that whenever Jason's ego-booster level drops, he has to do something to get it back in line. It's like when the oil light comes on in your car (no, not a corvette), you have to pull over and drop in a quart. The manual tells you to check your oil level frequently, and Jason is good at making sure that he always has enough oil to hold him until the next station on his journey. Nothing wrong with self-promotion, Jason is one of the true Internet masters at it and he will most likely author a book on the topic someday. Others seem to share the same view.

Earlier this month, Pete at Mashable wrote, "A trend: sometime every Saturday afternoon Eastern Time (now), tech bloggers run low on real news, and a story about bloggers themselves gets an unnecessary amount of airtime." Looks like we have this weekend's winner! That's right, "Facebook/Comment Bankruptcy" is your winner. Please see the cashier at the front for your prize.

Let me summarize Jason's initial post about Facebook Bankruptcy: "I can't keep up with how fast people are adding me, so I am turning it off." I will admit that I am not a Facebook master, so other than "friending" people, I don't know what else is involved. Scoble says it takes him mere seconds to add a friend. I think what happens is that as we add more and more, even more and more want to be added. Jason has 4000 people following him and he is following another 2900 on Twitter. No idea about how many on Facebook. It does seem that Facebook needs a bulk-add option. At the same time, they probably need a follow option as well.

Robert also notes that Facebook is the new rolodex. He is right. These new tools are sometimes a bitch to get configured and setup, but they are replacing the old-school rolodex. The key is to make sure you always have a connection to whatever or whomever you need. I call it the "internal network." It's important to know who to go to when you need x or y. Want to know a real bitch? Having to put the # before every color in a style sheet. I want to declare pound bankruptcy!

NYC venture capitalist Fred Wilson says, "I think Facebook's an important phenomenon, maybe as important as Google over time. That's a big maybe, but you have to pay attention to maybes." Fred also believes removing comments is not the answer for Jason and suggests he take a blogacation (ok I made that word up!). "You can't turn off the comments and have a truly interactive blog with a community. Comments are where it's at in blogging," he says in a reply to Marc Andreessen's comment removal.

Video blogger Loren Feldman says, "Is Jason becoming disillusioned?" Loren says that Jason is a leader and that if he does something, others might follow. Loren is "freaked by it." and suggests that Jason stick in there.

Let's move on to the other part of Jason's bankruptcy: comments. He has deactivated the comments feature from his blog. Absolutely his right to do so however I would not call it a blog anymore. I wrote about comment removal earlier this year. When you can't comment on a blog, then it becomes a Web site. Jason notes, "At the end of the day this blog is a conversation between me and the people I care about." It would be great if he could explain that comment. In my opinion it is no longer a conversation. It's a shout by Jason and a reply somewhere else. The idea of a blog is that I say x, you say y, we discuss and arrive at the answer of Z. Now when I read Jason's posts, I have to go hunt down any objections or agreements, and then try to put all of that together. Now that's a damn lot of work. Jason says he removed comments because of all of the assholes who comment. As a side note, the popular book "The Secret" says that whatever we put out is what comes back to us. No idea if that applies to blogs and comments. I am guessing that Jason could easily afford to get offshore help for comment removal but then he couldn't post about it and we wouldn't have Pete's Sunday news.

Now here is where the real humor comes in! Jason just posted asking for help with his iPhone. And he turned comments on! So when it suits him, he will put on comments. When he needs help, feel free to comment. Otherwise, no comment for you!

I don't know Jason. I only know him based on what I read from him and about him. He seems like a very bright and knowledgeable guy who has obviously made it out of Brooklyn and to the big time, which is awesome. I still hope we get a chance to sit down and talk one day. My emails to him earlier this year went unanswered, only time I got a reply is when I commented that he spelled Neil's name wrong in the SEO battle. His reply was, "Don't be an asshole." Jason invited me to be part of his Mahalocast last month (which I thought went very well and appreciated being part of the panel) and he has commented on CN regarding Mahalo a couple of times. My last emails to him, requesting a TechCrunch20 press pass and a Mahalo page about my startup have gone unanswered.

My guess is that Jason will start accepting Facebook requests and opening blog comments soon. This is just a temporary oil leak. What do you think about all of this "friending" on so many networks and platforms? Overkill or a necessary evil? And should blogs be allowed to disable comments? Leave a comment :-P

Jay/Kevin, I have two suggestions for your Digg service to which I am quite confident will address the issues here and here that I raised last week. Both topics I posted seem to have at least 50% of the commenters agreeing with me which led me to start thinking about how to help improve your service. Without any further ado, here are my two major suggestions for improvement. These suggestions come from reading hundreds of posts and comments about the subjects I wrote about.

1. Offer a feed for comments on a post

Since the notion of removing comments all together on Digg seems to be out of the question, what about offering a feed for comments. Then I, as site owner, can choose whether to include Digg comments on my site which would address my concern about the content creator having all comments appear on his or her article.

Perhaps the content creator could decide whether comments could appear on other sites outside of their own and Digg. They may want to limit the feed to those two.

2. Allow me to show my site inside Digg after it leaves the home page

In my first concern post last week, I asked whether Digg should be indexed by Google. I still am not convinced that it should be. So to combat the issue of a user not making it to the actual content site, I propose that Digg offer content creators an option to offer the site content page that is on Digg perhaps inside a frame. If this was an option, I would be more comfortable with Google returning Digg results.

So how would this work? Once a site leaves the home page or if a story is buried, the Digg page would show the site (live) inside a frame within the Digg page. Now the user sees the diggs, the digg comments, the actual content and any associated comments. This provides an awesome holistic view of the content. And everyone is happy.

Conclusion

So there are my suggestions. Simple suggestions which will increase your value to the community. If you would like to discuss them in more detail, feel free to contact me. I would certainly be happy to help you improve your service for both your community and for the content owners who keep your service moving.

As I do more interviews and discuss the Web with people in my travels, one of the questions that people ask me for advice on is when is the right time to remove a comment. Now I am sure half of you reading this article will say, “Never” and the other half will say, “Anytime you want.”

My belief is that there are some limited circumstances where removing a comment is appropriate because everytime you remove a comment that is not one of the below items, your trust level may become questionable. Here are my thoughts:

• Spam – if the person is posting about penis enlargement on a site about iPods, this should be removed
• Illegal activity – duh.
• When a comment is clearly causing a fight not related to the topic

When should a comment not be removed:

• Just cuz.
• When the comment calls out the writer of the article to explain where they came up with some figure/statement
• When the comment calls the writer’s integrity into question

I have seen many posts on the “big Web 2.0 boards” which call into question the site owners accountability for the posting. Yet somehow those posts are removed later in the day. But yet, posts that compliment the writer stay. And I do believe that a site owner should/can do whatever they want.

But when you remove posts that contradict what you say, call you out to explain something, then your trust factor declines. And over time, if enough people do not trust you and your posts, they will go elsewhere. Even if you are the biggest today, when your customers (that’s what users are btw) question your ethics and trust level, they will eventually leave.

So I call out to the current leaders of the Web 2.0, both product and news sites, think before you remove. Your trust ranking is at stake.