Comment is freed

Commenting is synonymous with blogging and the notion of blogging is a conversion meme is a long standing one. Blogs, at their best, are like finely tuned forums where authors serve as moderators, starting discussion threads with posts. However, plenty of bloggers switch comments off. High profile example's include Dave Winer, Seth Godin, and Marc Andreessen. On the whole it's not that they wish to deny readers the opportunity to discuss and debate issues raised, it's that the negative effects of enabling comments outweigh the positive. If your blog is popular or you're writing about on sensitive issues you're likely to face a litany of time absorbing problems including spam, low quality, off-topic or threatening comments. It's another case of the technology and infrastructure not being mature enough to fully support the ambition.

Although comments are one of the most pervasive examples of user-generated the systems that generate and display them suffer from a number of common problems:

• Organisation: wouldn’t it be nice if the comments were organized in a broadly useful way? For example, wouldn't it be cool if I could search horizontally across all blog comments for topics like you can with the blogs themselves. Wouldn't it be great if I could track conversations properly tuning my attention to the latest debates of interest to me? Wouldn't it be cool if I could aggregate in one place the remarks I made over the web.
• Authentication: wouldn't it be great if I could log in once and not need to re-authenticate every time I visited another blog site.
• Reputation: What if identity was actually managed, so you could look and see all the comments that Cory Doctorow made, regardless of which blogs they were on. Or you could rate comments and give them authority based on reputation? Wouldn't it be cool I was recognised as having authority in some subjects and not in others.
• Indexed: comments are rarely indexed so they have become the dark matter of the blogosphere.

Of course some of these problems are rooted in the very architecture of the web itself and so common across multiple sites and services. Unsurprisingly, while nothing has ever really stuck, some solutions like TypeKey were proposed.

Over the last few months the battle for better blog comments has heated up with a rash of services, including coComment, Co.mments, Commentful, Disqus, Intense Debate and SezWho.

All these services offer a slightly different service with varying complexity. Co.mments is the simplest service offering a elementary browser bookmarklet that lets you (or your readers) track conversations regardless of whether or not the stock commenting system offers such a feature.

Disgus and Intense Debate are both offering a distributed commenting system, meaning if several sites have it installed, users can share the same identity (including login) on each site. Each user profile includes commenting karma. SezWho is unique in that it's not a replacement for your existing commenting system, it simply enhances the one you have by offering membership into Sezwho's network. This network layers on a reputation and rating system to comments and users of your blog. coComment is similar but without user voting. Although not strictly comments MyBlogLog offers a much lower friction way adding interactivity and enhanced community your blog through presence.

However, these system are only as good as the blogs they sign up. With each of the services being mutually exclusive, there are only so many strong blog communities to compete over. Until some common protocols are established or a single provider establishes a commanding market share we're just moving the information from one to another, albeit slightly larger pot.