Thanks to my FriendFeed, I saw a blog entry from Fred Wilson about Disqus.
Disqus adds threaded comments to your blog, instead of the usual inline comments and or using the @convention. This has been a nagging annoyance of mine – threaded comments makes for understandable conversation flow. It’s hard to interact when every new comment seems to start a new point and conversation, even if it’s an actual reply.
Disqus replaces the existing comment structure with their own (hosted) solution. Once I uploaded and activated the plugin it took me only a few moments to set everything up – I was worried about losing existing comments and checking the “entries with no comments and future posts” option left everything intact. I then went to the Disqus website to set up my profile and enable my settings.
In his post, Fred Wilson says that the number of comments and interaction on his blog has gone up five to tenfold. I tweeted about installing Disqus and immediately got a response from Daniel Ha (co-founder), who pointed me to this FAQ page.
Disqus features:
- Integrates with your blog
- Receive/reply to comments by email or SMS
- You can subscribe to conversations
- Moderate and block unwanted comments/commenters
- Very customizable
Disqus works with a number of blogging platforms including WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger and Tumblr (my next Disqus site!). Sites that have implemented Disqus (according to the post, there are over 10,000 blogs) include Fake Steve Jobs, Scripting News, Rev2.org and, of course, A VC.
I’m looking forward to seeing what impact Disqus has on the conversations on my blog and will update with any significant impact.
Other posts on this topic:
UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb’s Corvida compares SezWho to Disqus and Intense Debate
