ReadWriteWeb

Ever since Google+ arrived on the social scene, Blogger has gone through a few transformations. Surprisingly, the latest update to Blogger has nothing to do with Google+.

Today the Google Buzz blog announced that blogger now supports threaded comments. These comments make it easier for the reader to figure out if a commenter is responding specifically to their comment, or just making a general comment on the thread.

There is a catch, however: Users must go to their Blogger profiles and select embedded comments, and enable a full-text blog feed. This is relatively easy to do.

Another year has come and gone, and it's time to recap 2011 in all its glory. While most of our recaps will educate you, I hope this one, filled with the top comments from your peers, will inspire you (or at least make you giggle). So whether this list has you nodding your head or gnashing your teeth, we're happy to have played a part in your life this year.

Of course, this list is subjective, so please let us know what you think about the voices we've chosen.

Commenting system Livefyre has announced version 2.0 of its platform, introducing new features to bring conversations from the social Web into on-site comments. SocialSync grabs related Twitter and Facebook comments automatically, so there's always a conversation on the page, even if no one has commented yet directly. It also adds @ mentions from within the comment box, allowing users to tag and notify their friends on those services, drawing them into the conversation.

"Everything we're doing is about increasing engagement on publisher content," says Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer. By drawing in conversations from where they're happening on the social Web, Livefyre sites will become the hubs of conversation about their own content again. People who prefer to chat on social networks can still be involved, but sites will still benefit from those conversations on their own pages. Twitter and Facebook are built in at launch, and Google Plus is coming soon.

Visitors to WordPress.com blogs will now be able to sign in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts in order to leave comments. This is in addition, of course, to being able to comment anonymously (as a "Guest") or as a WordPress user.

The new feature is intended to give users the flexibility to decide which identity they want to utilize for comments, even if they're logged in to WordPress via multiple accounts. You can, for example, be logged in via Facebook or WordPress but decide to leave your comments under your Twitter profile.

Just over a month ago, Facebook released its much-feared commenting solution for third parties. In that time, Facebook Comments have made their way to more than 50,000 websites, including the Los Angeles Times, Funny Or Die and Vevo.

Today, Facebook announced a set of improved features for publishers and users, alongside some stats that seem to say that the commenting system actually increases, rather than decreases, discussion and Facebook referrals.

This morning, Facebook released its much-feared commenting solution. The idea made big news earlier this year, despite the fact that Facebook has already offered a commenting solution for more than a year, but today the company has announced the feature officially.

So what's new? There are a number of features for both publishers and users, although some of the most exciting features we've seen displayed on Facebook late last year don't appear to be a part of the release. Is Facebook's massive social graph enough to push it into the default slot for comments, where it already resides for things like social sharing and third-party login?

YouTube comment threads aren't exactly known for offering highly intellectual discussions. Today, however, YouTube is introducing a new experiment that is meant to highlight the best comments on any video. This experiment will offer a "highlights view" of comments that shows the top rated comments and comments from the uploader at the top of every comment thread.

Ten days after Google's Sidewiki was accused of lifting features from annotation startup Reframe It, the little company is striking back. In a video interview with Reframe It CEO Bobby Fishkin, ReadWriteWeb learned why this 15-person team thinks they've got a fighting shot at besting the search Goliath.

A backlash against anonymous commenters and trolls seems to be underway. Only last month, a court case was settled where anonymous commenters ended up having to pay big fines to the women who they defiled using vulgar, derogatory remarks on an internet forum. And previously, an anonymous blogger in the modeling industry was forced to reveal her identity after numerous malicious posts about a colleague showed up on her blog. Now the latest scandal in this new trend of "giving the trolls what they deserve" is causing a controversy all of its own. And this time, the nasty comment didn't just lead to an embarrassing reveal or a heavy fine, it cost someone their job.

Those of us who manage online communities have learned to crowdsource a big chunk of our work: identifying user contributions that deserve a higher profile - and those that deserve to be dropped in a deep, dark hole.

But there has to be something more nuanced than just thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. And so...