This case had been in litigation for years, having been originally filed back in 2007. The problem stemmed from the fact that internet sites such as AutoAdmit are essentially able to operate under different rules than those that apply to TV and newspapers when it comes to libel. This is due to a law called "Section 230," which immunizes internet publishers from legal harm. At the time of its establishment in the 90's, however, those "publishers" were the ISPs themselves - the AOLs and CompuServes that delivered Internet access to consumers. The idea of bloggers, social media publishers, and anonymous blog and forum commenters didn't really exist yet and therefore wasn't taken into consideration. That meant the women weren't able to sue the operators of the discussion board website itself, but had to go after the anonymous posters instead. That, of course, was quite the challenge.

In the end, the women's attorneys were able to identify some eight or nine of the anonymous posters, according to the Hartford Courant and they settled with some of them.

Because the terms of the settlement were confidential, the lawyers representing the former students, Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, would not discuss them. However, San Francisco attorney Ashok Ramani, whose firm, Keker & Van Nest took the case pro-bono said that their clients were "very pleased with how the case went." The women had sued for monetary damages so a settlement means they were likely awarded at least some of the amount they had hoped for.

Was the Settlement a Win or a Loss? Depends on Who You Ask

Marc Randazza, the attorney for one of the defendants scoffed that if the women's intention were to have the negative comments removed, their interests were very poorly served. "Now there's even an Encyclopedia Dramatica page for them," he told the Yale Daily News.

However, David Rosen, one of the women's attorneys and a Yale Law professor, countered that unmasking some of these anonymous posters who were hiding behind pseudonyms and then holding them accountable for what they said had accomplished "the fundamental goals of the case." He thinks the suit may even have some internet commenters thinking twice before posting. The possibility of a lawsuit "may make some people pause before posting comments that are malicious and completely indefensible," Rosen was quoted as saying.

Will This Really Change Things?

While obviously a major case, this suit isn't the first time a defamation case like this has been brought to court. In fact, only months ago, an anonymous blogger using Google's Blogger.com service was sued for rants she made about a fellow model, one Liskula Cohen, on her site "Skanks in NYC." The victim sued to reveal the identity of the malicious blogger. Thanks to a judge's ruling that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information they had on the site's creator, the blogger in question was revealed to be Rosemary Port. (She's now suing Google for not protecting her).

Although a slightly different case, the womens' suit involving the forum commenters also succeeded - at least in part - in revealing the identities of those posting the defamatory messages. Combined with the prior example, it will be interesting to see what impact these cases have on the online world. Will this lead to more lawsuits where alleged victims seek to out the identities of their internet foes? Will it lead to more self-policing among the commenting community? Will internet trolls actually think before they type?

It's too soon to say, but it's possible that a kinder, gentler - and possibly more boring - internet may be in our future.

Encouraged Commentary currently offers three compelling features:

First, highlighting any section of a post avails a "respond" button that allows users to immediately comment. Clicking respond grabs the highlighted text and adds it - in blockquote - to the content of the comment, simply and easily referencing the exact passage that the user is discussing.

Second, working with comments, themselves, offers additional functionality. Highlighting and clicking respond within a comment automatically establishes the familiar "@user" addressing to make the intended recipient aware of the conversation directed at him/her. The highlighted text, again, is brought into the comment for reference.

Third, the connections among comments are tracked. Mousing over any commenter's name reveals a list of his or her other comments in the thread. Clicking on list items allows users to "jump between related comments and responses quickly" - something that threaded conversations have been working to capture. Reply and Quote buttons allow the user to jump into the conversation without highlighting.

Granted, the young project is not without its rough spots. Users are reporting issues with IE (shocking, I realize). And some of the implementation of the concepts could use refinement. No doubt that will come as more people engage in the project.

But those issues are easily overlooked. Because what is most compelling about this approach is the natural conversational dynamic that Jeffers has captured. You do what seems natural: highlight and respond. And you do so with context. That dynamic provides both Encouraged Commentary with content and the "hooks" to track the history of the conversation without adversely impacting the user. What's more, it provides a series of reference points that encourages new users to enter the discussion - and to do so just as easily as the conversation began.

If we see widespread adoption of this sort of thinking, it's quite possible that we may see the conversation returning to comments.

To see Encouraged Commentary in action or to try it yourself, visit Don't Trust This Guy, Jeffers' blog. To download the source code, visit the Encouraged Commentary project on GitHub.

Now WordPress.com has embraced email for exactly that purpose. A new WordPress.com feature - currently in closed beta - adds actual utility to those "You've got a comment" emails: Reply via Email.

Voila! No more logging into the Web site to participate in the conversation.

As part of the announcement, the WordPress team has also hinted that threaded commenting may soon be part of the WordPress.com offering, as well.

WordPress.com users who are interested in test driving this new functionality can - ironically - head to the post on the topic and leave a comment to be included in the beta. But they'll have to act fast. Participants will only be accepted until 6 PM PT (UTC-8) on October 24.

It's safe to assume that this simple improvement to the current commenting workflow will be met with a favorable response. The comment thread for beta participants is already filling with people interested in using the new feature. No doubt threaded comments will be equally welcome. Although I have to admit, I'm curious as to how the threaded concept and this new email reply concept will mesh. Also on my mind? How the commenting features of Automattic's Intense Debate acquisition will be folded into the WordPress family.

Perhaps we'll hear more about all of this as we draw closer to the launch of WordPress 2.7 on November 10.

Installation

Artiklz currently directly supports Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and self-hosted WordpRess blogs, though you could theoretically install it on any web site. To install it, all you have to do is to sign up and put a short snippet of code into your site's html code.

If you want to see what comments Artiklz would aggregate for your own blog, you can try this very straightforward demo here (you might have to reload the page before you see your comments).

The basic layout of the Artiklz blog widget is very plain, but you can add your own custom CSS to make it fit in better with the design of your blog.

Tracking and Notification

Another nice feature is Artiklz' ability to notify you by email, SMS, or instant messenger (only Google Talk and Jabber are currently available) once a new comment is made about your post on any given service.

You can also add a badge to your blog that gives your readers the option to be notified when you post a new article, or when somebody leaves a comment on a given post. You can also track a specific person's comments across the web.

FriendFeed

One feature we really liked about the Artiklz FriendFeed integration is its ability to bring in comments from across FriendFeed, while other plugins often only aggregate comments from the first post on FriendFeed, but ignore those from links shared later on.

Competition

We like the fact that Artiklz tries to appeal to both bloggers and readers, and that it supports a very wide range of services. It does not directly compete with JS-Kit, SezWho, or Disqus, as it neither provides any reputation management functions, nor its own commenting or comment management features. Instead, it is squarely focused on aggregating comments.

Verdict

In our tests, Artiklz performed just as advertised and if you are a blogger and concerned about comment fragmentation, we recommend you give it a try.

Comment and review plug-in suite JS-Kit announced today a new round of funding and the hire as an adviser of one of the web's most forward looking innovators, Data Portability Working Group co-founder Chris Saad. Though JS-Kit has a funny name, the company has a big installed base. In addition to being very easy to install, it recently partnered with red-hot content sharing service ShareThis and acquired the early market leader in plug-and-play commenting, Haloscan. What does the future look like for JS-Kit and how might that relate to the web at large? We asked Chris Saad for his thoughts this morning.

Saad: I think that there is certainly an opportunity for new types of data capture through these sorts of plugins - and if transformed into something useful like APML it can certainly be used for personalizing all sorts of things, including ads. The difference in this iteration of the web, however, is that the user will and must be in control. They will have visibility and utility from the resulting data acquisition.

RWW responds: Saad can't disclose too many specifics here and perhaps it's not in the company's interests to disclose any at all. APML seems like a non-starter at this point, but we'd like to see things like recommendations, pattern detection, benchmarks and time-based analysis of conversation around content.

RWW:How does your engagement with JS-Kit jive with your work on data portability? Isn't off-site discussion hosting the opposite of user (in this case publisher) control over data?

Saad: JS-Kit is unique in that it does not have a destination site so it does not host discussion off site. In fact, the commenting widget specifically syncs all comments back to the base CMS platform so that the publisher can uninstall at any time and not lose any of their comment data.

Also JS-Kit's social plug-ins make it possible for all sites to become social, making 'social networking' a feature of any application a user visits. The question now is how do these sites and applications, as well as other technologies, inter-operate for a web-wide data portability enabled social network?

RWW: How is that different from the recently acquired IntenseDebate or Disqus?

Saad: Both are great companies doing great things; the question is scale, pace and sustainability. The sustainability piece is important too - the fact that JS-Kit is nailing big commercial accounts is very important. Evite, Worldnow, Jetblue, Sun etc.

JS-kit has 550,000 sites, 20 people and has revenue (and now lots more capital). Don't forget breadth of product line also - JS-kit does comments AND ratings and Polls etc. It's well known that ratings are used 5x more than comments on sites.

RWW:One of the biggest critiques the data portability has faced is around "usability," clarity of value proposition and ease of implementation. JS-Kit seems fabulously usable, but we haven't seen much of the deeper possibilities emerge from it yet. What do you think the data portability community can teach the publishing community and what do you think JS-Kit in particular can demonstrate to other vendors?

Saad: I think that proprietary forms of data portability such as Facebook's app platform have been very usable (if not lacking utility). The trick is to achieve the same easy user experience on a web-side platform. As you rightly point out, JS-Kit's widgets are very usable - look for deeper possibilities emerging in the coming months. I think that JS-Kit has a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate data portability principles to publishers and other widget vendors as well. With the scale of JS-Kit we are no longer talking about starting from zero.

RWW: We're excited to see what all the vendors in this space can do. We hope to see developments coming from a data-driven strategy that places a premium on innovation and data portability. The first player in this sector that cries uncle and turns into nothing but an ad network will deserve some derision. These days things are looking good for JS-Kit, though.

Photo Credit: Brian Solis

It is noteworthy that IntenseDebate's infrastructure goes far beyond being a simple commenting system. The service also includes profiles for commenters and spam control, which should integrate very well with Wordpress' own products.

A few of us here at RWW have used IntenseDebate in the past. Even though we liked the service overall, we found the reply by email function a bit lacking and undependable at times. Also, the plugin does not degrade well when commenting on a mobile device, though this is a typical problem with commenting plugins.

One feature we really like about IntenseDebate is that it supports OpenID, even though we called the actual integration "a bit clumsy" in an earlier review. IntenseDebate also stands out because it allows you to easily switch away from the service whenever you want to. You can just export your data and import it back into your native blogging software's comments database.

What About the Competition?

IntenseDebate's direct competitors include JS-Kit, SezWho, and Disqus, all of which have a very similar feature set. It will be interesting to see how these companies react to this news, especially because Automattic has also announced that WordPress 2.7 will implement some of IntenseDebate's features, including reply by email and threaded comments. Automattic's WordPress.com already hosts millions of blogs, and integrating IntenseDebate there might just make it the de facto standard for blog comments.

As with so many Google acquisitions, Omnisio's product doesn't seem to be so advanced as that Google couldn't produce it in-house as well. Chances are that Google was mostly interested in the talent at Omnisio - something they hint at in the announcement of the acquisition that mostly focuses on how great the expertise of the Omnisio team is and less on the actual technology behind Omnisio.

Besides video annotations, Omnisio also allowed its users to make their own videos by assembling clips from blip.tv, YouTube, and Google Video. Clearly, Omnisio was already working closely with YouTube's assets, so this acquisition probably seemed like a natural fit, though it remains to be seen if using blip.tv videos will remain an option after this acquisition if Google ever brings Omnisio back in some form.

Users could also use Omnisio to synchronize slide shows with video clips. In many respects, Omnisio was similar to Viddler, which also has comments as its main distinctive feature, though Google, of course, also already allows its video publishers to add annotations to their videos.

Given the level of maturity of most YouTube commenters, it remains to be seen how useful this function is going to be when/if it gets integrated in YouTube. At least with the current commenting system, you can still stay away from the spam, flamewars, and ubiquitous "that sux" comments.

Here is an example of Omnisio's annotation technology in action:

Evite's biggest challengers are probably not even other invitation services, but social networks like Facebook and MySpace. However, given that Evite is geared towards a very mainstream market where email is still king and not everybody is on Facebook, that challenge only applies to a certain sub-set of users, especially college students. By refreshing its look and by adding more social networking features as well as photo sharing, however, Evite is doing quite a good job at staying fresh, even though the company has been around for ten years now. The question for Evite is going to be if its users are going to accept these changes, which are pretty far reaching and include not just the new features, but also an updated user interface and the ability to import photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube.

JS-Kit is clearly on a roll right now. After acquiring the commenting system provider HaloScan just a few weeks ago, this partnership with Evite gives JS-Kit access to a very large number of users. JS-Kit is currently deployed on more than half a million sites.

Maybe It's Just Not Useful?

For one thing, this functionality is built into the Mini-Feed (the feed on a user's profile page) as opposed to the News Feed (the stream of all your friends' updates), which means you only have the ability to add a comment if you're visiting a friend's profile directly - a place where you already have many options for commenting - like the Wall, for example.

Also, unlike FriendFeed, which this feature is obviously modeled after, comments don't cause the news item to bubble up to the top, so it's possible you could miss seeing the comments. This could especially be an issue if you log in and do a lot of activities - like adding applications, joining groups, and friending others - before glancing at your Mini-Feed. All your latest activities will still be at the top of your feed, while the commented-on item(s) will have fallen further down the page.

You aren't alerted about the new comments, either, like you are with application notifications, so there's even more of a chance that they can be missed.

Yet all that wouldn't matter so much if this meta-commenting was actually a feature users were clamoring for. But are they? Outside the early adopter set, commenting on updates and posted items in this manner may not really be an activity that many people care about.

Do Mainstream Facebook Users Get It?

When explaining the feature to a few mainstream Facebookers to see what they thought, the responses were just lukewarm. Obviously, this wasn't a scientific survey, but their reactions could possibly be indicative of the typical Facebook user mindset: Why comment on a feed item about a photo upload when you can just comment on the photo itself? Why leave your friend a comment they could miss when you can write on their wall...which they are notified about?

With these questions in mind, we wonder if it is possible that the commenting feature hasn't taken off yet not because it wasn't visible, but because most Facebook users don't really find the feature that useful? What do you think?

Being transparent about who you are and what your interests are is fundamental, but beyond that there are a variety of ways you can add value instead of being an annoyance. Below, we discuss five of those ways; we hope you'll add thoughts of your own about how to comment appropriately - unless you work for one of the comment hosting companies, of course (just kidding!).

The Fundamental Mood of a Good Comment

Bad comments from companies are loud, self-centered, only semi-relevant and often have the tone of a spurned lover. Good comments from companies are super humble, gently engaged with competitors and focused on adding value to the discussion of the whole sector.

A Grey Area

One comment type that lives in a grey area is the "don't forget about us" comment. That's one of the most common types. It's annoying. This author at least welcomes emails like this because it's hard to remember all the relevant companies in any given sector. Leaving a "what about me?" comment publicly though just looks bad.

Here are five ways you can add more value than by just throwing your company's name and link into a blog post's comments. An example is provided for each strategy; these are decent examples, really great examples are still too rare, unfortunately. We know you're capable of really nailing it though and we don't want you to be afraid to try.

1. Update Us on New Developments

When we write about any company or service, one thing that we ought to make sure we do is consider where that company's competitors are in the market. We hope to compare feature sets, user growth and any number of other factors. That's easier said than done, though, so we welcome comments from competitors that provide us updates about where their service is at.

This is especially true when we're talking about a new technology that only a limited number of vendors have implemented support for. A good recent example can be found in the comments on our story about C-Shirt, the Creative Commons remixable t-shirts passed on by QR code and mobile phones. QR codes are common in Japan but are just starting to emerge in other places.

In a comment responding to that post, Eric from a semi-competitive company called SpringLeap complimented C-Shirt's integration of QR codes and Creative Commons, then pointed out that SpringLeap would soon be adding QR code support to their online clothing service too. QR codes are unusual enough that we were glad to learn about another company moving in that direction.

Feel free to comment about updates to your service that we may not be aware of when they aren't so rare, either. If you can focus on the update more than on the "me too" feel, then we'll appreciate you taking the time to broaden our knowledge of the field.

2. Clarify Your Product or Market Position

Never is it as obvious that top tech bloggers have limited knowledge about the things we write about than when we write about you or your company. Who knew we could be so wrong?

At those times, a good blogger will welcome your clarification. We may not have used your product enough to know about the big differences between it and other products it got thrown in a list with. We might have some real misconceptions about where the company stands in growth, history or target audience. Please, let us know in comments so we can be more informed next time we write about you or your sector in the future. This is a conversation!

When we wrote about the adoption rate of Microsoft Silverlight earlier this week, we said it could be picking up the pace compared to the adoption rate of Adobe Flash. We were (I was) wrong in our assessment of the situation. Adobe's John Dowdell jumped in to comments and put some numbers in perspective for us. He also offered some analytical perspective of his own, as someone deeply engaged in these issues. His comment wasn't particularly gentle, but that's ok - he works for Adobe and we were very wrong in the assertion he was commenting on.

3. Articulate Differentiation

You know your company and your competitors better than we do. Tech bloggers tend to know the nitty gritty about one or two niches that they personally engage with most closely, but we often write about far more than that. That's ok, but we could use your help, vendors, in fleshing out the details and differences between various service offerings. Our readers come to our sites to learn about what tools are available to solve particular problems. There is no way we could articulate the full breadth of options and the differences between them as well as we plus our commenting readers can.

As long as you don't stop at "me too," go on too long or talk only about yourselves - comments about differentiation are more than welcome.

When we wrote about hedge fund power research suite FirstRain in April, we mentioned another service called RivalMap. RivalMap's Kris Rasmussen jumped into comments and let us know his company's product was adding several of the features that FirstRain offers (foreshadowing yesterday's announcement of a partnership with Newsgator) but that the primary differentiation was a price margin of tens of thousands of dollars!

There are probably even better examples of company comments intended to articulate differentiation. One of the inspirations for this post was a comment left by Iterasi (disclosure: a consulting client) in a post about competitor LaterLoop over at WebWorkerDaily. Company blogger Alex Williams thanked WWD's Jason Harris for mentioning his company in a review of a competitor, praised the competitor's unique feature set, then articulated some fundamental differences between the companies that Harris didn't mention in his review and finally closed the comment with more appreciation for the competitor. That's a model example of a company adding value in a dignified way to a blog post about a competitor.

4. Talk Up the Other Team

Have you seen the blog posts on places like TechCrunch or GigaOm about one company announcing a round of funding or being acquired, where that company's competitors leave a nice short comment simply congratulating them on their good fortunes? Just a short congrats, signed by the name of a representative of a competitor, with their name linked via the URL field in comments to their company's site. That's classy. Don't throw your URL into the text of the comment or take that time to talk yourself up. Just offer a dignified congratulations and the unspoken message is that your niche is further validated, a rising tide lifting all boats. Don't act like you're drowning.

A different but good example of this kind of comment can be seen in our April post about the ongoing success of aggregator PopURLs. We wrote about PopURL's new sponsored collaboration with Intel.

Semi-related competitor DIYStartupNews.com left the following comment:

"This ia great idea and reminds me of techmemes sponsored news sources.

This is smart marketing move by intel, more companies should look at sponsored branding of sites like this. I should imagine they are getting a good return on their investment. "

Well, we bet you think it's a great idea, DIY, maybe you'd like a little of that kind of action yourself. Also, why enter your URL in the "name" field? Is that what your mother calls you? We'd love to get to know you as a person in this industry.

Criticism aside, that was a good comment - PopURLs did come up with a smart model that's reminiscent of another successful model, Techmeme's sponsored feeds. We hadn't thought of that comparison, otherwise we would have mentioned it. That was a useful celebration of PopURLs' success and a good comment to leave.

5. Add Humor or Insider Insights

People who eat, sleep and breathe wikis, video hosting or local review sites for example all have jokes, details and perspectives that those of us who simply use and occasionally write about such services just can't have. Leave some of that information in comments! We'll all feel smarter, we'll feel like ReadWriteWeb is the place to come for deep insider knowledge and everyone will appreciate you and your company for it!

When we wrote about the growing number of serious uses for wikis last month, Whit from Wiki.Answers.com jumped into comments and pointed out that Comscore called Wiki.Answers the fastest growing site of 2007. Touche! That was something that we suspect wiki-heads probably knew. (I've consulted for wiki companies and remember now that Wiki.Answers were mentioned as a big player.) As a non-specialist in the field of wikis, though, that's the kind of detail that I just didn't know. It was self promotional, and a link would have been nice, but it's an undeniably important detail in a general conversation about the growth of wikis.

An even better example of offering insider knowledge in comments can be found in a comment from this morning to our coverage of Japanese video site NicoDou. Jane from Akibanana.com, a news site that supports a company offering tours of a particular Japanese sub-culture, left an incredibly helpful comment that included two good links to sites other than hers, some updates on the topic of the post and other information that we simply didn't have the context to include in our original post. It was a fantastic comment and gave readers a great reason to click through the commenter's name to learn about the company she represents.

Conclusion

A lot of this is common sense, but some of it is particular to the emerging culture of the social media market. We're blessed at least in the US to have a very active social media economy - so lots of our readers here have jobs with companies related to the subjects of our writing. We want you to participate, you have so much you can add! It can be a great way for you to increase you visibility in the market, as well. See our post about the New Robert Scobles for a discussion about other ways this can be done.

If we saw half as many simple "don't forget about me!" comments and twice as many comments focused on humbly adding value to the conversation from the perspective of someone working at a related company - the quality of conversation in the tech blogosphere would be dramatically improved. We'd love to see that happen.

Are there other ways you've seen value added appropriately in comments by company representatives? We'd love to learn about more strategic options; spamminess is really annoying, learning together is fun and fulfilling.

Images via Flickr CC: "I Must Be Getting Old" by idogcow and "Welcome Hands" by dtcchc