Time might have nominated you as the Person of the Year, but Gawker Media, the publisher of such popular blogs as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Kotaku, is savvier: The company is making you into a contributor -- if you're a commenter, that is. Gawker owner Nick Denton stopped by the Wired News offices…

CoComment had a good amount of time to get out ahead, but now the new blog comment startups are coming out in force. CoComment, you’ll remember, allowed users to track their comments across multiple sites and blogs via a bookmarklet, and (later) blog plugins. Disqus, from YCombinator-funded…

What a difference (less than) two years make! Here I was complaining about losing half the conversation …. two months later three comment tracking services debuted: coComment , MyComments and co.mments. Of these three, coComment developed decent traction. Fast forward a year or so, and we…

I am lending a new startup a hand by letting them showcase their new comment system on this blog.I don't know how much I am supposed to say about them, so I'll stay silent on them for now.You'll notice that this post and the previous post and any future posts will be using the new comment system.I…

Colorado-based startup incubator TechStars has launched their second company today, Intense Debate. We covered TechStar’s first company, MadKast, earlier this week.Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting system that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Installing…

At the beginning of this week we introduced a new comments feature on Read/WriteWeb, called SezWho. Basically it introduces comment rating, reputation and filtering to this blog. SezWho was created by one of our occasional writers, Jitendra Gupta - whose team installed it onto R/WW. You can check…

Even if you never read a single thing Dave Winer wrote in his 439 years of blogging, it's worth taking time to study his ideas about comments on blogs (he doesn't allow them)."...to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments…

Incentives work. Our whole economy is powered by incentives — as one of my favorite business books Freakonomics reveals.Incentives work in the blogosphere too. Commentors will respond to incentives. Motivate your readers to comment with the following WordPress plugins (hat tip to…