A centralized comment system takes the commonly seen discussion portions of a weblog, online journal, or other such device and offsets it to a centralized service. In other words, instead of using the comments built into WordPress, Flickr, Tumblr, LiveJournal, or whatever other service you might use, that functionality gets offset to some other centralized service. It still appears in all the places it used to and makes it easy to group the discussion with the original content. But, additionally, it provides a lot of extra functionality for both the content creator and those participating in the discussion.
To those participating in the discussion, it provides a clear path toward having a single account (or only a handful of accounts) for comment creation. For those that regularly comment on many blogs, this will be a huge timesaver and a reduction of frustration. It also allows users to keep track of what they write in various places online as well as those comments that have been replied too. Additionally, it allows them to keep track of comments that their friends and other respected people may have left on other blogs.
As a content author and media creator, the concept of a centralized comment system may not seem immediately useful. However, providing a clean, consistent interface to commenting and making it as easy as possible to do so fosters more participation — and more participation only means more traffic. Additionally, it can save you some server load as you no longer have to host the meatier portions of those features. Finally, it can allow you to provide features you may not have been able to before including adding comments to a site that wasn’t even comment-enabled before.
Currently, there are two centralized commenting systems that seem appealing: Intense Debate and Disqus.
Intense Debate seems the most interesting to me at this time. First, it supports OpenID making it that much easier to get people involved. There also seems to be more momentum behind the project than with Disqus and the developers seem to have a similar mindset to how I would build it if it were mine. There is a planned API (so that Javascript is less required) and importers planned for many platforms. It’s not all the way there yet. Without the API, content authors can’t benefit from the Google-Juice that is provided with the discussion being a part of their site. And the current wordpress importer simply doesn’t work for me. It formats the comments poorly, and fails to import all of my entries. But, it’s a work in progress and I understand that. I should be getting a beta version of the comment importer later today to test.
Disqus is more independent. You could use discus as a threaded discussion forum without an accompanying website, if desired. For some, this is a “pro”. For others, it doesn’t matter at all. There’s no OpenID support in Disqus either and they don’t even have broken and/or experimental comment importers to test. But their API is complete and they seem to have a nice handful of features planned for the future.
Unable to decide which is better, I’ve decided to give them both a test drive.
I’ve installed Disqus at revjim.net. I’ve installed IntenseDebate at Arranging Light. As soon as I put the final touches on my TumbleLog, it’ll be using IntenseDebate as well.
Let me know what you think of these tools. After all, it’s as much for you as it is for me.
