Hot on the heels of the launches of Disqus and Intense Debate, commenting reputation system SezWho has raised a $1 million series A round from KPG Ventures and upgraded their offering. The investment makes SezWho the best funded of the small group of startups currently trying to improve community for commentors. Considering how enhanced commenting somehow became a more competitive space overnight, the money also came at a good time to help speed development.
SezWho has a more basic offering compared with Disqus or Intense Debate, but with a much lower point of entry. It doesn’t entirely replace your comments or wrap them in a fully featured social network. Instead it focuses on simply helping separate the good commentors from the noise by adding ratings and reputations to your blog comments. The Wordpress and MovableType plug-ins let readers order comments by rating and explore the history of their commenting across SezWho enabled sites. The plugin doesn’t require users to sign up for a new account, but rather links commentors based on email address. If someone tries to hijack your reputation, though, you can claim your email address and remove the unrelated comments. VentureBeat and reportedly over 300 other sites use the system, totaling over 100,000 users. Today’s press release also says that the service will work across forums, social networks, and wikis, although that’s not currently the case.
Comment ratings are determined by other users simply answering the question, “Was this comment useful to you? Yes or No”. But not all votes are equal. Commentors with higher overall “star” ratings from consistently highly rated comments have greater weight attached to their votes. SezWho also has a “Red Carpet” widget that highlights a site’s top rated commentors to encourage more participation. Readers can sort the comments based on these ratings and view other blog comments from users by checking out their profile, all via an AJAX popup. The idea is that users will be drawn to comments left on other sites and drive traffic across all SezWho enabled blogs. SezWho has some analytics tools that expose exactly how much traffic other sites are drawing to your blog.
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Do we really need better comments? Is this solving a problem or just technology for technologies sake?
I think Patrick is right. I would love to think something more elegant than regular comments would take off but doubt it… for now. There needs to be a compelling need. Imagine Digg 10 years ago, there wasn’t enough content or regular readers to justify such a system. It will be interesting to see how this plays out but I think this is a 1.0 attempt at a need that doesn’t exist… yet.
Patrick, if I could connect to your circle of friends, find out what your favorite food is, and favorite movie, and possibly age, I think I could relate more to the comments you’re making.
Then again, I hope I have more of a life than to waste my time on a ‘commenting social network’.
Sezwho seems like a moderate value-proposition, and that’s exactly what there should be in comments.
Is my comment good, bad, how bad?
Do you want to see just good comments? hey Amazon rating system
Do you want to see more reviews, sorry comments by me? Good thing there’s no patent on these things
Then again, you can always bury my comment and pretend this never happened..
You can connect with my online friends and know what I like by reading my blog which is linked from all the comments I make.
I think this is more like, lets do something kinda thing.
Is there a need….not right now. Like many of you have said, it is still 1.0.
We do something similar, but in Flash, so there is no download needed, and you can do it anywhere — not just moveable type and wordpress. You can see the widget, which has a full control panel back-end, here: http://www.askthenextpresident.com/
I like the idea of generic tools like this becoming widgetised - why not add ratings, or a ’share with my friends’ link, or a guestbook …
… wait, are we in 1998?
This guy has an interesting comment on the SezWho business.
http://techwaste20.blogspot.co.....y-poo.html
Thank you for information.
Is techcrunch planning to use any of these “comment system” software? Intense debate impressed a lot. They are trying to develop a social network around the comments. But rating system is just like Digg..
We’ll be testing this out at ad:tech next week. It’s potentially interesting, though I haven’t seen enough to know if we’re deeply interested or just tangentially interested
Hi, Jitendra from SezWho here…Some clarifications:
We are not replacing comments as a number of commenting companies are trying to do…We are a context, ratings and reputation system focussed on making it easy to discover good content across the social web. In fact, our commenter based content discovery mechanism helps drive additional traffic to sites.
The way it works is that once users find a good bit of content by a commenter they are look at the profile of the user where they are likely to find links to other pieces that the user has commented on. This leads to additional page views on typically older content on the site.
All-in-all we make it easy for readers to follow their favorite comments, for commenters to carry their reputation and for site owners to drive additional traffic.
-Jitendra
What make’s you think “popularity” increases reputation? What separates the insightful comments, from the QUESTIONS, from the jokes…which in all likelihood will have the highest ratings…?
Alex, its really up to the community and the highest reputed members of the community…The ratings are scaled based on the reputation of the rater withing the context to ensure that conversation is beneficial to all of the community.
-Jitendra
@Mitch Maddox (#2):
It’s interesting that you brought up Digg–have we already forgotten the craptastic commenting implementation there? While I agree, most small blogs, or low comment volume blogs really don’t need a full featured (kitchen sink) comment system, something that can give me a fairly familiar experience, with the ability to track favored commentators, ignore the people who regularly piss me off, etc sounds like a solution I’d take. Granted, a lot of what we’re seeing is “1.0″ (must we start using this term? Everything being 2.0 and now 3.0 is annoying enough), but hey, we have to start somewhere right? I’m anxiously waiting to see what takes flight from the group and evolves into something we’ll all be wondering “how did we live without this in the old 2.0 world?”
WE CERTAINLY HAVE A PROBLEM WITH COMMENTS. THE ‘@’ PREVIOUS COMMENT JUNK SHOWS THIS. @ MIKE, @ JOE, ETC. IF WE HAVE REPLY TO COMMENTS IT WILL HELP..
I love(d) it! This looked pretty good. I went to the site. I signed up. I downloaded the code for a WP blog in order to do some testing. I installed the plugins. Then my “key” would not validate. So I went to the site to look for some trouble-shooting tips,,,,,and …. well nothing. There is no Contact Us or Forum… Just a BLOG…. Now what do I do?
Jitendra, Tedd, “where are you guys?”
Why is there a need to give marks on comments? They should be spontaneous. And who is voting on them? Is the person authoritative enough to vote? It’s limiting communication or even repartee.
I used to go to another tech blog but when I saw they installed that rating comments, it suddenly look snooty for me. Just my opinion.
Les, thanks for your recommendation…What is your blog url (hard for me to guess today as we are getting a lot of hits)? Contact me at contact@sezwho.com and we will get this sorted out…
-Jitendra
Les,
Also our support forum is at
http://sezwho.com/support/
And FAQs at
http://sezwho.com/faq.php
Thanks, Jitendra
Les,
Also our support forum is at
http://sezwho.com/support/
thanks, Jitendra
And FAQs at
http://sezwho.com/faq.php
(sorry I had to break the messages to bypass the typical link limit)
Thanks, Jitendra
this is something new to hear
you may find my blog http://lapnol.blogspot.com in digg as well which is related to future technology
Jitendra,
I did follow the links you mentioned above — and I did send an e-mail to your contact us ID. No answer and the FAQs and support forum have not helped. Should I just uninstall the WP plug in and move on?
Les
Most of the recent newcomers in commenting and ratings are trying to distinguish their offerings on the basis of user-facing “social” features, including user profiles, “portal” sites that promise to drive traffic back to publishers, etc. In contrast, we’ve been focused on delivering known value to publishers in the form of solid, easy to deploy services, enterprise-class infrastructure, powerful administrative tools and data-access and SEO options that support publishers directly. So far, over 8500 publishers seem to support this approach. We think they will continue to do so, at least until the network scale is there to make social features truly valuable out-of-the-box.
Cheers,
Eric at js-kit dot com
Les, I send you a mail yesterday…Odd that you did not get it…I just resent it again.
Eric, We are not looking to build a portal site…We are a value add service to the existing site…
Thanks,
Jitendra
I’ve more or less been doing nothing to speak of. I just don’t have much to say these days, not that it matters. Basically not much noteworthy going on worth mentioning. So it goes.