TechWinter

What can Disqus do for your website / blog?

Disqus is a Comment 2.0 web service that allows all social website owners and readers to enjoy the benefits of more advanced community management.

Social readers
For readers the ability to register once and then comment on thousands of blogs is attractive and with a host of social features built into their service such as comment threading, profile pictures, comment history, reputation management and multiple subscriptions of communities, conversations, individuals, or topics.

Reputation Management - Disqus calls it Clout…

At its core Disqus is a really large Comment network, which allows a registered user to comment on more sites more often without registering with each and everyone of them.  And recently Disqus announced they are now allowing third-party OpenID users to login without registering making registration altogether unnecessary when using their service.

Social website owners
For owners Disqus provides comment moderation and spam filtering, blacklisting, named moderators and reputation management.  These services usually require a great deal of effort or cost to include in most websites. Also integrating these features so they appear seamless in their appearance and function can be time consuming and costly even for many technically inclined WordPress users.  Disqus makes the process of running a community much easier not just by adding a few basic comment features to blogs, but also by allowing sites like ours to build communities for you our readers to enjoy.

Disqus seems to always be hard at work creating new and compelling features for publishers and one of them is a neat new feature called ‘Community pages‘ that allows for permanent topics such as Startups to be created within the comment service by site owners giving you a chance to carry on discussions that are independent of articles on ‘Hot’ topics or as I refer to them ‘Enduring Interest’ topics.

With small to mid-size publishers always on the look out to improve their competitive edge Disqus has a willing audience but there are some questions every publisher will have as we did and they are;

• How reliable is the service?
• Will using Disqus interfere with my reader/writer relationship?
• How easy is it for us to leave them if we have a business dispute?
• Will Disqus be around for years or months?

Where are we now?
All websites have a common struggle and that is to get more community involvement and with services like Disqus providing excellent community functionality and tying in their offering with identity management services suppressing the negative side of commenting such as spam and plain rudeness, more and more readers may feel compelled to participate. The more participation there is the greater the conversation, which means a more dynamic social eco-system.

If you want to learn more about the Disqus organisation you can check out our previous article on them.

Have you been using Disqus? Do you see yourself using them in the future? Have you or do you use their competitor CoComment? Discuss it all in our Disqus ‘hot topics’ area Startup!