SezWho, a comment enhancement plugin, has launched a new release that incorporates a number of new features, and also also announced a partnership with citizen journalist portal Instablogs.
Instablogs originally launched as a blog network but faltered, transitioning to primarily a citizen journalist site. We last covered the site in March when it was negotiating a $3 million funding round, and the site was putting up some relatively impressive numbers (it current reports around 2 million readers).
As part of today’s release SezWho will be adding support for the following new features:
-Four new universal profile templates, including support for popular
threaded discussion formats.
-Support for local CSS and JavaScript
-Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down ratings posts
-Configurable pop-ups
-Improved support for filtering
-Support for multiple WordPress installations in a single database
-Feed incorporation for BlogCatalog
One of the knocks against some other enhanced comment sites is that they store comments away from the originating blog, which could lead to trouble should the blog ever stop using that service (though these sites are now allowing for local backup). SezWho doesn’t manage comments at all - instead it appends universal profiles that keep track of a commentator’s reputation and credibility across all SezWho-enabled blogs. This helps drive extra traffic to member blogs as SezWho recommends relevant posts, and can also lead to more worthwhile discussions.
SezWho competes with enhanced comment systems like JS-Kit, Disqus, and Intense Debate.
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Dunno why , but i hate Sezwho . But this service looks exciting , thanks for the update Jason
Hmm…no lay-offs at these companies….yet :)…
But blogging is dead, right?
@Jason
Sure is dead :)…that’s why we are on this site…to watch it dying :)…
BTW, no top banner display ad anymore here? Only Google Ads? Seems Techcrunch feels the display ads advertising downturn….
TC should enable SezWho.
How do companies like SezWho get so much press coverage? I have never seen it in use in the wild and I couldn’t get it to work with my site. Maybe it works well with Wordpress, I don’t know, but the Developer Toolkit is a joke. I think it’s silly to form a new social network just for blog comments anyways, when you could just integrate blog comments with an existing community (like twitter).
The notion SezWho presents that it is not a competitor to other enhanced comment systems is pretty amazing given that they compete for the same space. I think it would be wiser for them to create ways of working with the leaders instead of trying to gain their own marketshare.
This compete graph shows little to no adoption: http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv
SezWho just isn’t attractive. They are overfunded with little traction. My prediction is that they die within a year.
Jim, SezWho is not a destination site but rather a distributed service so site based compete data is not a good way to analyze how they are doing and compete data is very unreliable.
I have seen them in a number of places and really like their service. To me it seems like they are doing fairly well.
Karl
Jim people don’t have to visit their site to moderate comments etc, you can’t use Compete as it is apples to oranges.
With Sezwho, if I want to run a blog which is partially a private community, I can - that is not possible with other platforms.
You can’t really use the other systems without giving them contol of you comments, which makes them next to useless for my purposes.