Just FYI - I wrote a post on the Semantic Web for our company’s blog here. Please feel free to read and comment.
Author archives
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
Related posts
Jeff Jarvis in his BuzzMachine post today discusses his Guardian article about Gary Vaynerchuk. I had the pleasure of seeing Gary at a TechMeetup at Webster Hall a few weeks ago and in ten minutes changed the way I was looking at my job and my life. Not an exaggeration.
Go pre-order his book and look at his videos on WineLibraryTV. Go now.
Jeff Jarvis really captures the excitement and devotion that Gary inspires in anyone who watches his content or is lucky enough to meet him, as well as a great glimpse into his background.
Gary Vaynerchuk is the American Dream personified in Social Media.
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I’ve been using Mahalo, Jason Calacanis’s “people-powered” search engine for about 5 months - and am really enjoying it.
Mahalo uses “guides” to build our SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) so that the most relevant results are always given the most importance. The problem is the amount of manpower it takes to build out all of those results. So, besides the actual Mahalo employees, the service looks to crowdsourcing to fill in the results - and will pay them for their work (Mahalo Greenhouse).
Then came Mahalo Social, which added a social component to the service and Mahalo Follow, a way of sharing the links you upload to other services including De.lic.ious, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Jaiku and StumbleUpon. This was actually the piece that helped me get more involved with StumbleUpon, as Tamar Weinberg - AKA Queen of all Social News sites - was always after me about. Using a quick combination of keystrokes, I can easily post a link to all of these sites, or any combination I’d like.
As an aside - I rarely post links to Twitter - I’m protective of my network and don’t want to spam them with a lot of links.
But what makes any company - especially a startup - is the people. And everyone that I’ve had contact with from Mahalo has been impressive. If I send a feature request or some bug report, it’s been rare that I don’t hear from someone within the hour. Jason has been very gracious about forwarding reports to the right people and I always hear back with solutions or a commitment to fix the issue. This has really added to my enjoyment of Mahalo - even when my links are denied (or added!), it’s with a very polite note.
So who uses Mahalo? I”ve started using Mahalo for search results - it’s fun to see what people recommend and I really enjoy the Guide Notes. But the real value is for people who are looking for simple, specific results, or find Google results too confusing. It’s always hard for me to remember that most people don’t use the Web like I do and need easy tools that make them comfortable. Then I spend some time with my sister, an elementary school teacher with her first Mac, who doesn’t know what Twitter is and is nervous about shopping online. So I bookmarked Mahalo for her. With the easy and clean user interface, she’ll be able to find whatever she needs quickly (Google results are also included on the page).
And that’s valuable to both of us.
Hi, I'm Jane Quigley, Relationship Director for 
