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Blogged started out as a straightforward blog directory in early 2008. Today, Blogged announced a major redesign of its product that puts the service's focus on facilitating conversations around blog posts. Blogged now presents users with a Facebook-like feed of blog posts, with the ability to comment on posts and share them on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, Blogged also rolled out support for Facebook Connect and a widget that allows bloggers to bring comments made on their posts on Blogged back to their own blogs.

Over the past couple of years, we've seen multiple social browsing experiments launch with plans to unite online users to collaborate, chat, and connect as they visit various websites. Services like Me.dium and Browzmi debuted with much fanfare, but in practice, the take-up on them has been limited to a relatively small set of users. More recent initiatives, like Adaptive Blue's Glue, have fared a little better yet still seem to attract only the core audience of early adopters. Now a new service called Fytch aims to join this group with their "social commenting" service which allows you to leave comments on any website, whether or not that site supports comments or not. Will it do any better?

After a short private beta test, JS-Kit just announced that Echo, its new blog commenting platform, is now available as a public beta. Echo aggregates conversations around a blog post from across the Internet and allows users to share their comments on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. Echo offers a number of well-designed and unique features, including real-time updating and the ability to capture social gestures related to a blog's content like star ratings and 'likes' from across the Web. In addition, at least for the time being, JS-Kit also offers good spam and obscenity filters.

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Mollom, the spam-filtering startup that eliminates comment and post spam on popular content management systems, just reached two important milestones: it processed 100,000,000 messages and is now actively protecting over 10,000 websites.

At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

The Web is changing. In today's world, user participation can make or break a site. Allowing users to react, participate, and contribute while keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. If poor-quality content or spam hits your website, it can undermine your site's search engine listing, damage your brand and reputation, and degrade your visitors' experience. Good user-contributed content, meanwhile, can add a lot of value to your site, which translates into more activity, improved stickiness, and more and better monetization opportunities. As the Web continues to become more social, more websites will need a strategy to deal with spam and unwanted content.

You may have heard the news this morning about Trent Reznor quitting Twitter due to the behavior of internet trolls who made the experience both uncomfortable and upsetting. OK, he didn't quite use those exact words - his rant was much more profane - but you get the drift. However, Reznor is not alone in wanting out of the social media scene. Popular author Stephenie Meyer also recently ditched her MySpace page for good, lamenting how she missed the early days when she could hang out with people online.

But "hanging out with people online" is supposed to be the promise and the potential of social media today, not something from days gone by...so what's going wrong here? Have the trolls ruined social media for good?

The Google Reader team just announced the addition of an important new feature to Google's popular feed reader: you can now comment on any item that your friends have shared with you. In order to keep track of these conversations, Google has now also introduced a 'comments view' that will only show an excerpt of the post, but which highlights the comments your friends have made.

IntenseDebate, a commenting plugin for popular blog platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad, just announced that it will allow third-party developers to write plugins on top of its new Plugin API. The company launched this new feature today with plugins for PollDaddy, Seesmic, and YouTube. Publishers can easily activate these new plugins from their IntenseDebate dashboard.

Facebook launched its first social widget for use outside of Facebook's own site today: the Comments Box. The Comments Box is a comments widget that was built on top of Facebook Connect, and that will allow bloggers and publishers to easily implement a Facebook Connect enabled commenting system on their sites. A number of sites already used Facebook Connect to make it easier for their users to sign in to their services and leave comments, but this is the first time that Facebook itself ventures into this business.