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, and more will get a whole new layer of reputation ratings based on what types of communities they're interacting with. For example, a highly reputable user who frequents tech blogs will come into blogs in other disciplines like science or politics with a slightly higher starting reputation than a standard user. The same goes for bad users, who will come into new areas with a bit of a warning above their heads to give other users the heads-up.
This same system will be applied retroactively to any other conversations that have been tracked for SezWho users. That will effectively augment some people's ratings for better or worse.
In my call with Gupta last week, he spent a lot of time digging into FriendFeed, which has received a lion's share of the attention in the Web 2.0 community and quickly is becoming a destination site of its own.
Gupta argues that SezWho is laying a better groundwork for content owners since people will follow what their friends are doing online using a system that doesn't take eyeballs away from the original content--something FriendFeed has recently strayed away from a bit with its rooms implementation. I don't put the two in the same class of sites, but I can see where he's coming from after designing a service that lets you keep tabs on people as long as they're visiting SezWho-enabled sites.
As to whether there would be a client-side version of the reputation service to remedy interactions with non-integrated sites, Gupta would not comment.
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.
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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.
I'm at the San Francisco New Tech Meetup tonight, immersed in Web 2.0 startupville. Tonight's lineup of pitches:
Conduit. A utility for making toolbars to go with your blog or site. We recently covered the tool's new capability that lets the user swap between different toolbars they've installed. The concept is interesting: It lets site publishers put their sites into toolbars. I didn't expect users to take up this idea, but the company's executives report strong growth and more than 12 million users.
SezWho. This is an interesting system that allows users to rate other users' content, like their uploaded videos and blog comments. It's distributed, so if you have a good reputation as a contributor on one site and then you go to a new site, you good reputation can go with you, as well as links to all your contributions on other sites. Requires site owners to install links or plug-ins on their site, and SezWho then gets all the data, which it distributes to member sites. Interesting, since it knocks a few bricks out of the walls that sites tend to build up around their user bases. Very good for the new media powerhouse: the blog network.
US4real. Yet another real estate mashup that combines data on cost of living, crime, school performance, etc., with real estate and rental listings. It's a bit rough at the moment, and there are several very well-funded companies in this space. Also, it returns data only by city, not neighborhood--that's not specific enough. It does appear to have a comprehensive listing of houses and rentals, though, and it has a cool feature that flags houses whose prices have dropped a lot recently. Also, it will let you draw an outline around an area you're interested in, and will e-mail you when houses on it go up for sale. Cool.
GlobalMotion. This is a wiki focused on locations, maps, and geotagged images. It's an interesting way to navigate geodata, and it reads in location-tagged images already on EveryTrail, Panoramio, and Flickr, which is kind of neat. A good question from the audience, though: Why not just contribute this functionality to Wikipedia, which already has about 200,000 entries about locations? The answer wasn't very satisfying.
CrazyMenu. This was my favorite site of the evening. It's a utility for business lunching. It helps you corral co-workers together for a lunch, decide where to go, and even create group orders that you can transmit to your restaurant before you get there. Since I love lunch, I look forward to trying this out. Great idea.
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