commenters

Facebook will soon be making it possible for members to leave comments on each others' "mini-feeds" of activity, according to an announcement Wednesday from the social network. The development is slated to go live later on Wednesday. In other words, it's a very meta turn. Facebook members will now be able to comment on the announcement of a posted item in addition to the posted item itself.

Currently, Facebook allows members to comment on one another's "walls," as well as on individual photos, posted items, videos, and other pieces of media that they share … Read more

Distributed commenter reputation service SezWho is growing a little bigger Wednesday morning with the acquisition of Tejit, an engine that tracks content around the Web to see how it links up with people, events, places, and more. The tool began as a pet project for creator Indus Khaitan, who wanted to sort through blog content to find who had the most gravitas on any topic or in a certain field.

What does this mean for SezWho? SezWho's founder, Jitendra Gupta, tells me that in the next two to three months users of the add-on reputation system for comments, forums, … Read more

Video and text don't always go together, but that's not stopping video and audio microblogging service Seesmic from partnering with the distributed comment tool Disqus. Starting Wednesday, users of Disqus will get the added benefit of video commenting alongside the text entry field.

The option is turned off by default in Disqus, and must be enabled by whoever is administrating the account. We've gone ahead and turned it on in the Webware 100 winner pages, where we've been using Disqus since unveiling the 100 winners late last month. I've also added it to the end of this post, where you can add your own video comment after the break.

One small hiccup I've found is that Seesmic won't pull in your Disqus account information. You've got to be registered with the currently private alpha service to have it linked up with any sort of account. Otherwise you're limited to leaving an anonymous comment that can later be reclaimed when you get Seesmic access. Disqus founder Daniel Ha tells me the two companies are working on deeper integration for user authentication, but in the meantime anonymous recording is the easiest option for people who don't yet have Seesmic accounts.

I'm still not sold on the trend of video commenting. It's a bit gimmicky, and as others have said, it makes conversations difficult to parse. Ideally I'd like to see services like Seesmic partner with Jott to add a small transcript under the comment that would save me some time, and improve the experience for search engine bots, the deaf, and others who don't feel like watching and listening to what could be a simple sentence or two of thought.

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Social news site Digg is launching a new version of its comment system soon. The current iteration, which has received both ire and admiration from users, is changing for the better with several tweaks that will be the most noticeable for power users who troll the site for hours each day.

Of the advancements, the most noticeable is in load times, which have been tweaked by having comments load as users scroll down the page instead of all at once. Users can also now change their votes on other user's comments, and even delete something they've said at … Read more

LOS ANGELES--If Jim Brady had his way, there would be no guaranteed anonymity for those who post comments to Washingtonpost.com.

Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post's online division, said during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference here that he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards--and if need be--automatically kick them off for good.

Brady has a notable history with this issue and I'll get to that. First, his position must be made clear. In an interview following the panel discussion, Brady said he doesn't want … Read more

Commenting can play a major part in making an author's blog post deeper, and more interesting to read. It's like having a discussion in real life versus simply hearing someone speak--there are details, and alternate angles that can come of making ideas go two ways instead of one.

When creating a personal blog or one for business, there are the standard comment systems that come with your blogging platform, as well as a whole new breed of third-party tools that can add extra functionality, and potentially a deeper level of discussion to your site. So which ones are worth installing?

We've picked six of the major players in this space, and talked about what makes them more useful than the ones that come built-in to popular hosted blogging services like WordPress and Movable Type. Even if you're not on one of these two platforms, several of these solutions will work on a site you've built from scratch.

CoComment lets your readers subscribe to comments on a blog post, and share that thread with other CoComment users. It scrapes people's comments from threads they've replied to, so they can monitor and access the responses for multiple sites in one centralized location.

Adding CoComment to your site doesn't involve replacing your current commenting system, but it means you're signing up to be part of the CoComment network. If your users are active members of this community you might get new people discovering your content and taking part in the conversation--which could translate to site growth and prominence. The two things that turned us off to the service were the sometimes slow service and distracting ads that take are found on CoComment's main service.

Co.mments is a plug-in for blog owners, as well as a simple browser bookmarklet that lets you (or your readers) track conversations regardless of whether or not the stock commenting system offers such a feature. It works similar to some of the Web commerce price trackers we've looked at before, and will notify you if there are changes. Commenters can keep an eye on all the conversations they're tracking in one spot, and quickly browse through them like an river of news with a full list of keyboard shortcuts.

If you like Wordpress' built-in comment system and Askimet spam-catching plug-in, and don't want to ditch it for some completely different system, then Co.mments is a simple way to add tracking services for your readers so that they will know when to come back. However, it doesn't offer some of the advanced functionality of the others, and is mainly for helping your users keep track of what's going on with various threads on your blog--not making them more advanced. Several other services we're profiling offer subscription features of their own, but we liked Co.mments' in-box that lets you go catch up on multiple conversations in one place.

Continue reading to find out the other four services and which ones we picked out of the bunch.

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Correction: IPKarma does use e-mail addresses instead of IP addresses to track users. The namesake is a "recursive acronym." More over at the FAQ.

IPKarma is a new karma system to help track users who comment on your blog. The twist is it doesn't just track them for you, but also for any other blog owner who has the plug-in installed. It tracks each user by their IP address (not their username or e-mail address) and automatically creates a user profile for them when they leave a comment. Similar to SezWho (coverage), other users can then click … Read more

While most newspapers let the comments fly, students responsible for this school Web site have taken the unusual step of screening each comment before deciding if it deserves a public posting.

Read the full story at SiliconValley.com.

Group conversation service VoiceThread (review) has a great new feature called Video Doodling, which as you can guess, lets users draw on top of video clips on the fly. The technology, formally called a Telestrator, is best known for its usage in football games by John Madden, who pointed out things to look for to viewers at home with the aid of an onscreen drawing tool. VoiceThread takes a similar approach, and instead of overlaying drawings on video while it's playing, only lets you draw when paused.

In a sample clip sent to us (embedded below), creator Steve Muth … Read more