Battle of the comment add-ons

Comments

1. Aaron says:

   3/21/2008 at 5:36 pm

   I think cross posting comments to a service and a blog can be useful, but I see few benefits to allowing a service — that may not be around for any real length of time — to take over all of your comment functionality.

2. Jason says:

   3/22/2008 at 9:50 am

   I agree with Aaron that it’s a little scary handing over our commenting system to another location just for the sake of a few bells and whistles. However, unless Disqus turns out to be a major flop, I doubt it’ll disappear anytime soon as it has the potential to get something that most advertising organizations would kill for: customer-specific information.

   By handing over our commenting system to a service such as Disqus, Big Head Labs (the people that created the service) will collect an incredible amount of information about us which can then be associated with our email address. What kind of blogs do we visit? What keywords can be targeted against us? What’s our education level? What kind of things are we interested in? All of this can be easily collected, aggregated and used to present very targeted ads.

   Although it’s said that we continue to own control over our comments, and we can export them through the dashboard, there is nothing I can find on their site that explains their Terms of Service, or whether they aggregate our personal data and use it for marketing purposes 😕

3. bubazoo says:

   3/23/2008 at 11:03 am

   Well, I do understand how annoying it is to register for a new account on every single persons blog you visit, thats why nobody ever registers for blogs, because half the time, you don’t know if you’ll ever return to that blog once you leave a single comment, ya know what I mean? so sometimes its not worth registering if your only going to visit there once and leave a quick comment.

   having said that, since everybody I know uses a different blogging platform (my bro-in-law still uses moveabletype, I use wordpress, I know a few people who still use b2, etc) that I haven’t found a decient solution to keep users logged in despite what blogging platform there using yet. really there needs to be one standard and leave it at that, otherwise nobody will ever register.

   I mean, yeah sure registering for weblogtoolscollection is one thing, but when you got 900 blogs you read on a daily basis, well lets just say you don’t have time to register

4. Jonathan says:

   3/24/2008 at 11:36 am

   I never register for blogs. If they require registration, I just troll. I don’t require registration, and for a while I didn’t require name/email either. I want to encourage the conversation, not scare people away. And face it, 90% of the world still doesn’t know what RSS is, so why add some other whizbang just to say we did? If you want to keep the conversation going, add a plugin that emails the comment author if there are other comments left (like this site does).