Webware

Yesterday we were all aflutter over Disqus (review) and Intense Debate (review)--two companies offering similar products for replacing an existing blog comment system, and one is centered around universal profiles and comment tracking. Today we're taking a look at SezWho, a comment enhancement service that's been around since June (we briefly wrote about them last month), and has since been integrated into more than 300 sites.

Instead of replacing your current system, SezWho layers on a reputation and rating system to your comments. Registered users can vote on the usefulness of other people's comments, and that rating goes into an aggregate ranking that's a part of a user's profile. Like the solutions from yesterday, rankings are universal on any site that's integrated SezWho, meaning you're taking a track record of all your posts with you to other sites, where other users can explore what you've been commenting on, and how other users perceive you. The goal is to help sites sort out the good and the bad (employing self-policing from the users), and simultaneously letting people share and explore links amongst themselves.

Show off your most established commenters with SezWho's Red Carpet widget.

(Credit: SezWho)

This morning the company is announcing several new features. Two--one for site owners, and one for SezWho users at large--are all about user visibility. The first, called Red Carpet, is for site owners, and is similar to the top-users widget I mentioned with Intense Debate. Red Carpet lets site owners promote some of their most active discussion participants with a visual ranking widget that can be put anywhere. In a perfect world, users will see this somewhere and either explore some of the content these users have been reading, or feel the need to participate to get a place on the list.

The other widget is a SezWho profile badge, which users can post on any blogs or personal pages. Mousing over the badge causes it to pop up with a user's SezWho profile, including links to their latest comments, and other user ratings. Between the two, I see Red Carpet getting more traction, as blog owners seem more likely to promote the use of such a system to give their blog, and some of their older posts additional exposure in other parts of the SezWho network.

The new profile widget can go anywhere. Mousing over it would give you a quick look at a SezWho member profile.

(Credit: SezWho)

What might end up being the most useful addition is a new set of metrics rolled out last week to both SezWho users and blog owners. Users get to see a more open set of stats about how many people are rating their profile and comments, while blog owners get access to a new internal tracking tool that shows where any incoming SezWho traffic originates. The data charts aren't as extensive as something like Google Analytics, but it's a nice addition for site owners to keep an eye on user involvement.

On a side note, our (CNET's) TalkBack commenting system has a similar feature for rating a user comment's usefulness, and users can hop between our various sites with one account. The biggest difference is the option to jump to other sites with that same ID.

I must say, I really like the idea of SezWho. Comment rating is a very useful way to sort through the good and the bad--assuming your audience is keen and plentiful enough to make it worthwhile. Where SezWho inherently falls short is how deeply it can be integrated. While it's nice that you don't have to replace your current system, you're missing out on a single user profile for both the site and commenting system--something which is possible with larger Web-based blogging platforms like Wordpress.com and Blogger.

Consider today two-for-Tuesday on Webware, because we've got another universal comment system coming out of private beta today. This time around it's Intense Debate, a new service that replaces your blog's standard commenting system with an enhanced version that features analytics, user profiles, and a tracking system.

Like Disqus, which we looked at earlier, Intense Debate is full of all sorts of commenting goodness like deep structural threading, an up or down voting system per comment, and integrated user profiles with reputation. You also get the bonus of a really slick dashboard that lets you track which posts are getting the most comments (with shiny charts) and some community tools like an easy-to-use widget that lets you promote some of your top site commenters on your front page--similar to what several popular Weblogs Inc. blogs used to do.

For the sake of your users, there are also some handy ways they can interact with Intense Debate's system without getting jettisoned off the post. For example, users can register with the service right in the comments field, either using their registration system or with an OpenID. They can also subscribe to the post's comments RSS feed (which Disqus also has) as well as sign up to get notified when someone replies via e-mail.

Switch the style of your site's comments on the fly with one of three built-in styles included.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What I find most appealing about Intense Debate's approach are its setup tools and administrative controls. Besides some of the visual analytics I mentioned earlier, the setup to white or blacklist certain words or phrases can give you a whole lot of control over automating comment moderation. You can pick one of three ways you want comments to appear on the page, and even tweak the look and style of them with one of the included themes, or use the version that will try to mimic your site's design--which I found to work only so well on a custom Wordpress blog. Advanced users can go in and skin the heck out of the thing by linking up to a custom CSS file.

The big thing services like Intense Debate and Disqus offer is the holy grail of a universal ID for comments, something I touched on earlier when taking a look at Disqus' approach. I think the hardest hump for these services to get over--a problem a product like coComment doesn't have--is that it requires adoption by content providers instead of users. I'm happy to install a browser plug-in or sign up for one account in one place, but blog owners with closed or proprietary systems will have a tougher time making that kind of move, unless these services offer significantly more to users and site owners than other plugins or built-in user registration tools on popular platforms.

To see Intense Debate in action, here are a few blogs that have integrated it:
The Gong Show
Colorado Startups
The Thinking Blog
TechStars

Intense Debate comments in action as seen on ColoradoStartups.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)