{"id":2277,"date":"2008-03-18T16:38:18","date_gmt":"2008-03-18T21:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/03\/18\/disqus-and-the-comment-o-sphere\/"},"modified":"2008-03-18T16:38:18","modified_gmt":"2008-03-18T21:38:18","slug":"disqus-and-the-comment-o-sphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/03\/18\/disqus-and-the-comment-o-sphere\/","title":{"rendered":"Disqus and the comment-o-sphere"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a number of people &#8212; including Nick Gonzalez at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2008\/03\/18\/disqus-picks-up-a-half-million\/\">TechCrunch<\/a>, Dan Frommer at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alleyinsider.com\/2008\/3\/blog_comment_startup_disqus_raises_money_adds_features\">Silicon Alley Insider<\/a> and Om Malik over at <a href=\"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/2008\/03\/18\/disqus-gets-vc-funding-releases-beta-2\/\">GigaOm<\/a> (who I think broke the story first) &#8212; are reporting, the hosted-comments company known as Disqus has raised money and launched some new features. There&#8217;s a post by Fred Wilson at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unionsquareventures.com\/2008\/03\/disqus.html\">the Union Square Ventures blog<\/a>, since USV led the $500,000 round. Disqus says it has about 4,000 bloggers using the tool now, and about 60,000 commenters in total.<\/p>\n<p>I know that the &#8220;Comment 2.0&#8221; space has a number of players in it, including SezWho.com and Intense Debate, but I think that Disqus is a more interesting play in a lot of ways, so it&#8217;s probably not surprising that &#8212; as Adam Ostrow <a href=\"http:\/\/mashable.com\/2008\/03\/18\/disqus-funding\/\">notes over at Mashable<\/a> &#8212; I use them for the comments here on my blog. I like the interface, I like the fact that it handles spam almost effortlessly, and I like some of the new features like the &#8220;community page.&#8221; Most of all, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/01\/13\/disqus-some-thoughts-on-comments\/\">as I&#8217;ve mentioned before<\/a>, I like the fact that I can respond to comments as easily as I respond to an email (SezWho has a somewhat <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sezwho.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/18\/disqus-raises-a-round\/\">pissed-off response<\/a> to the Disqus announcement).<\/p>\n<p>As I mentioned in that previous post, there are a few quibbles I have &#8212; such as the lack of support for trackbacks, which CEO Daniel Ha has said they are working on a solution for &#8212; but overall it&#8217;s a solid service. It also supports OpenID (through ClickPass) which I think is important for any kind of centralized comment system. Some people don&#8217;t like the idea that the comments are hosted somewhere other than their own server, but I think that is actually a benefit in some ways, and in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/01\/13\/disqus-some-thoughts-on-comments\/#comment-76224\">a comment on my earlier post<\/a> Daniel said the service would soon support synching between your server and theirs, which would be a cool feature.<\/p>\n<p>There are hints in Fred Wilson&#8217;s blog post about where Disqus might be heading with all this. For example, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unionsquareventures.com\/2008\/03\/disqus.html\">he says that he sees<\/a> the company as doing for comments what RSS did for blog posts and other information, and that Disqus could be the one that &#8220;<em>unlocks comments from blogs and brings them into the mainstream<\/em>&#8221; and also &#8220;<em>surfaces the most interesting blog comments and blog commenters<\/em>.&#8221; All of that presupposes that everyone starts using Disqus, of course &#8212; a tall order &#8212; but it&#8217;s still an interesting glimpse of where blog comments could go in the future.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a number of people &#8212; including Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch, Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider and Om Malik over at GigaOm (who I think broke the story first) &#8212; are reporting, the hosted-comments company known as Disqus has raised money and launched some new features. There&#8217;s a post by Fred Wilson at the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/03\/18\/disqus-and-the-comment-o-sphere\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Disqus and the comment-o-sphere&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}