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.

To change the blog to a full-text feed, go to Settings and select "Full."

To make comments embeddable, go to Settings > Posts and comments. Select the "Embedded" option.

Users who have already replaced their Blogger profiles with their Google+ profiles can share snippets of Blogger blog posts to their Google+ circles.

For bloggers who already have a good following on Google+, integrating the two makes a lot of sense. But for anyone who blogs on Blogger under a pseudonym, linking Google+ and Blogger closes the opportunity for that fake Internet profile. Threaded comments are available for users regardless of whether or not they integrate their Google+ and Blogger profiles.

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

In a July 29 post, Dan Rowinski reported that AT&T had announced plans to throttle the data speeds of users on their network who had exceeded the bandwidth thresholds the company had set on their 3G network. As you can imagine, many people commented passionately, but Chris Holt's comment, below, was so popular as to be our top rated comment of 2011.

Chris Holt - "Is 'bandwidth threshold' the term AT&T uses? Bandwidth is a rate not a quantity. It's like a cop pulling you over and telling you that you have used too many MPH this month."

2. What Do Kids Say Is The Biggest Obstacle To Technology At School?

Way back on April 3, Audrey Watters wrote about the Speak Up 2010 survey, and the findings that children want to be able to bring their own device and to enjoy unfiltered access. With 43 comments, many weighed in, but Janet Abercrombie shared an experience that few could, and her comment was widely appreciated.

Janet Abercrombie - "In our new 1:1 program, we (teachers) are trying to differentiate behaviors that are a result of character and behaviors that are a result of the technology. Before computers, I could take away pencils from students who were drawing or I could ask them to produce a drawing that demonstrates understanding of the lesson.

One of the keys to successful student engagement is to build in formative assessments that continuously check student understanding. I find that, if students need to produce something by the end of class and/or engage in a Google doc or other discussion thread (where I can review the history and see who types what), 95% of my students will remain engaged in the lesson. Students who do not demonstrate master of the day's objective get pulled into small groups for guided instruction the next day where the independent learners are given a more independent task.

My personal belief is that teacher PD should focus more on ways to differentiate instruction and implement formative assessments than about the navigation of hardware/software."

3. ATDHE Seized: How Site Takedowns Are Ceremonial

On February 1, Mike Melanson reported on the take down of ATDHE, a site that lists video streams, many illegal, of nearly every televised sporting event. MDurwin's comment was a passionate rebuttal to the act and through your upvotes, it's clear that many of you agreed.

mdurwin - "My biggest concern here is why is Homeland Security acting as the bitch of media conglomerates? How is a site hosting video, legal, questionable, or blatantly illegal the responsibility of Homeland Security? aren't they supposed to be hunting down terrorists? The CIA is not supposed to operate inside US borders, nor is the Military. The FBI and police are in charge of crime on American soil. So, which is Homeland Security? Pretty soon I expect they'll be jailing 12 year olds who rip Justin Beiber CDs and email the mp3s to their friends!"

4. Your iPhone Is Tracking Your Every Move

Earlier this year, on April 20, Audrey Watters detailed just how much your iPhone knows about you, including a look at the file "consolidated.db". Jason Moffatt's toungue-in-cheek comment must have made many of you smile. It comes in at #4 on our list.

Jason Moffatt - "Note to self. Get rid of cell phone before robbing that bank next week."

5. Verizon Blocks Hotspot Tethering for Jailbroken Devices

On August 5, Dan Rowinski reported that the throttling announced by AT&T earlier had likely begun as at least one person was being blocked from Android tethering on a rooted device. milrtime83 argued that this was an unfair charge, due to double billing. Many of you agreed.

milrtime83 -" 'The networks do not like consumers getting away with data for free.'

No, we are already paying for the data. They want people to pay for the same data twice."

Next Page: [6-10 plus a surprise guest]

6. There Will be 2 New iPhones, iPhone 5 & 4S, Analyst Says

From a June 27 article by Sarah Perez, we saw an analyst quoted about the upcoming iPhone 4s and iPhone 5 (now debunked). Paddy McCann poked fun at the analyst and made many of us giggle.

Paddy McCann - "How do I get to be an analyst? Seems pretty easy - just make stuff up."

7. Why Facebook's Seamless Sharing is Wrong

Not long after ReadWriteWeb started deep-diving into Facebook's Frictionless Sharing, Marshall Kirkpatrick told us why Facebook's seamless sharing is wrong. With 48 comments, the agreement on this post was deafening. Jeff Pester summed up the fear that many of you have in 8 words. Bumper sticker anyone?

Jeff Pester - "Zuckerberg's utopian dream is becoming our Orwellian nightmare."

8. Facebook, You're Not a Newspaper

Another passionately debated post, Richard MacManus' September 21 post, "Facebook, You're Not a Newspaper" looked at Facebook's recent newsfeed changes. Leila expressed outrage that again, Facebook was fixing what wasn't broken.

Leila - "I wish Facebook would just show me *all* updates from my Friends and Pages, in the order that they were posted, and let *me* decide which ones I don't want to see by hiding individual people, pages, or posts. I will never understand why Facebook insists on deciding for me which posts are important to me because it's frequently wrong."

9. Why Groupon's Super Bowl Ad Was So Offensive

Remember that Groupon Super Bowl ad that had so many people up in arms? Marshall Kirkpatrick shared, on February 6, why that ad was so offensive, including the dismissive mockery of Tibetan troubles and the observation that "it came across as the kind of out-of-touch humor that overpriveleged, spiritually mean, advertising industry creatives (specifically, the kind that kids refer to as 'douchebags') would come up with." BillieMac shared his point of view, that of a former ad exec, and his knowledge of industry norms made his comment all the more relevant and helpful.

BillieMac - "As a former ad exec, I have to assume that Crispin Porter steamrolled this ad right to air. Any reasonable effort to run this ad through a qualitative disaster check with consumers (i.e. a focus group) would have told them they had a problem on their hands. The adage of 'any publicity is good publicity' does not apply in this instance. Groupon had an objective: educate people about their brand and make a connection with people. They failed miserably on both fronts. They are a bunch of marketing novices driving a marketing vehicle. If I were a big brand, I certainly wouldn't be lining up to partner with Groupon right now. They just proved they don't belong in the big leagues."

10. MacBook Air Contest: What are the Considerations When Looking at Server Infrastructure?

Alex Williams asked, on June 3, "What are the considerations when looking at server infrastructure?" Dylan Ludwig answered with gusto, not forgetting to accommodate appliance needs, security, data control and pricing. While his comment didn't win that month, you loved it, with 22 likes.

Dylan Ludwig - "It's important to have secure access to applications and data from any network device, for business and personal use. With cloud based services, all devices are in sync with the cloud. Internal clouds allow computing on private networks, businesses can restrict applications and content, limiting uses. Customer support, cloud providers should work hand in hand with your needs, as your partner.

What appliances need to be supported; servers, firewalls, networks, etc? All infrastructures are unique. What's important to you? Security's a must, whether it's a shared cloud or unique to you. Creating a custom solution to fit the needs of you/your company brings power, mobility, organization, speed, simplicity/ease of access, and scalability. Imagine if your computer crashed; many files would be backed up within the cloud.

Cloud pricing can be expensive. ISP's cap the upload speed and most charge for data usage. Clouds continue to undergo security/privacy breeches. Some personally like having control of their own data.

Figure out your needs, for now and long term. Don't limit the accessibility of the cloud and your future. Infrastructure software should always be chosen wisely.

When I started using the cloud, it took me a while to understand its concept. We use cloud based services everyday without even realizing it, for example Google Docs and Gmail. Files on these services can be accessed from almost any device-- anywhere, anytime. Amazon introduced the Cloud Drive; it allows users to store 5 GB of files online for free. Apple's iCloud stores content and allows integration with all apps, but it's also restricted; an Apple-only service. Unlike most cloud services, data won't be accessible across all platforms. Cloud deployment is just a huge center for data storage; it's the future of our computing needs. Possibilities of clouds are endless and have a promising future."

Bonus Yes Klout Is Flawed, But Here's Why You Should Give It a Chance

As a bonus, we wanted to share a comment from our favorite robot dinosaur, Fake Grimlock. On November 22, Richard MacManus looked at how Klout might be useful, even if it's not perfect. Fake Grimlock found a use for Klout that not many of us had imagined...

FAKE GRIMLOCK - "IT GREAT IDEA! START SITE FOR ONLY BIGGEST ATTENTION WHORES ON WHOLE INTERNET.

THEN TRAP THEM INSIDE, BURN WHOLE PLACE DOWN."

What do you think? Did we pick the best of your top-ranked comments or were some overlooked?

"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.

The most important SocialSync feature for publishers is the automatic capturing of related comments on outside networks. When anyone shares or talks about an article on Facebook or Twitter, the comment thread on the article itself will automatically grab that comment and pull it in.

Twitter conversations are particularly hard to capture. Not only do they fly by in real time, they're scattered and incomplete. Many sites, ourselves included, love to use Storify to curate tweets manually, but the torrent of tweets can be too much to manage sometimes. Livefyre's new features can reduce that burden by grabbing related tweets automatically.

Facebook and Google Plus - which Kretchmer says is coming to Livefyre soon - are great for threaded conversations, but for that very reason, important conversations happen on those networks totally outside the confines of the original site. Those conversations represent huge value for publishers, and SocialSync will help sites that use Livefyre recapture it.

Kretchmer says the Livefyre database tracks the different sources of the comments underneath. To simplify the interface, Livefyre displays only one total number of comments. For comment threads themselves, publishers have a choice: they can separate out Twitter and Facebook comments from the on-page blog comments, or they can have one unified stream with just a small indicator of a comment's source.

The overall design of the commenting system can be styled to the publisher site. Kretchmer also says the system works "perfectly" on mobile sites. Real-time comment streaming, sign-in and sign-up through Livefyre or other social networks, and all its other desktop features work fine on mobile as well.

SocialSync is good for content strategy, because it will make the article page a more definitive location for users and search engines alike. But it's also good for community. It will take away that lonely feeling of coming to a blog post and seeing 0 comments. Kretchmer says that Livefyre helps publishers vastly increase the volume of comments and shares, creating valuable engagement between readers and staff, as well as driving traffic and increasing relevance to search.

Comments Are Part of the Story

Social networks have tried to provide this service themselves. Facebook offers a third-party commenting system, but it's not gaining much traction, and Twitter offers a range of resources to add value to publisher sites. But commenting services like Disqus - which we use here at RWW - and Livefyre let sites and their users use whatever channels they want for their conversations. Livefyre 2.0 and SocialSync will be great for publishers who want conversations to flourish without getting away from the stories that start them.

What makes a good comment thread? Start one here, and let's discuss!

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.

WordPress describes the process as something that "gives visitors control over which identity they can use." And no doubt questions over identity and anonymity (and online etiquette) continually plague blog comments - for both blog authors and for blog visitors. Will giving your blog visitors the option to link themselves to their "real" identities via Facebook improve the level of conversation? That's probably the hope - next to the desire for more engagement, of course.

It's worth pointing out here that what WordPress has implemented today isn't Facebook comments per se. Today's new feature is a matter of letting users choose the social profiles by which they comment, but it isn't a full integration. In other words, your WordPress comments aren't pushed back into your Facebook stream.

WordPress's Scott Berkun does say that better Facebook and Twitter integration features are coming soon.

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.

On the publisher (and blogger) end of things, changes include the ability to link directly to individual comments, generate larger News Feed objects (as seen below) and access comments using the API. Facebook also added a new, darker color scheme for darker colored sites.

The larger News Feed object gives a preview of the story when shown in the timeline, an obvious move at increasing user interaction. Facebook says two sites have seen exactly this sort of increase as a result of using Facebook Comments.

• Examiner.com continues to see growth with the Facebook Comments plugin. The site has more than doubled its weekly average number of comments since launching the plugin on March 1, and continues to record steady growth week over week. In addition to the increase, the site is seeing more engaging conversations and a significant decline in spam. Additionally, Examiner.com's referring instances from Facebook have more than doubled in the first month after launch.
• Townsquare Media (local radio broadcaster): Since the launch six weeks ago they are seeing an average increase of Facebook referrals of more than 45% across their 170+ sites, which is nearly double than just three weeks ago. Additionally, approximately  50% of facebook.com referrals are new visitors.

Techcrunch noted that, after implementing Facebook Comments, the number of comments had drastically reduced. This came alongside a welcome decrease in spam and trolls, of course, but perhaps at the expense of interaction and pageviews. Many people voiced their concerns that Facebook's requirement of a real identity to leave a comment could stifle voices and interaction. Facebook seems to offer these sites as a retort.

Are these sites one-off examples of increased interaction? It seems that the company's latest updates want to ensure that they're not. And increased ability to link to comments and give friends of commenters a larger teaser should help drive that 45% even higher for some.

Now, if only Google and Twitter were offered as login options, we wonder how much higher that number might rise.

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?

On the user end, there's the obvious benefit of serving as a quickly and easily accessible commenting system. That is, if you want to comment using your Facebook identity. All users commenting will have to be logged in using Facebook, which could present a problem for some who either don't want to link their real identity with their commenting or who don't have a Facebook account. Now, more information than ever could be available on third-party sites using the Facebook comment plugin:

You can obtain more context about a person by looking at the text next to their name, which will show if you have a mutual friend, the person's work title, the person's age, or the place that a person currently lives. This information will always respect the person's privacy settings and will only show what you can already see on Facebook.

Beyond that, most features are as expected - comments are threaded, will rise or drop according to the number of likes they receive, users can help mark comments as spam or abusive and share comments back to Facebook. The feature some will be most excited about, we expect, is the ability to comment as a Facebook Page, rather than just a user.

The big question is, where are all the bells and whistles? Remember this?

We got a glimpse of this commenting system on Facebook back in October 2010 and it looked like something to really be excited about. It had comment voting, rating counts, and gave individual stats on each commenter and comment. It looks like some of those features have been pulled into the background, as we're still seeing user networks in the new system, but no more down-voting. What's a user got to do to get a dislike around here?

The feature is launching with four initial partners: Discovery.com, Examiner.com, Sporting News and SBNation.

Will this be the feature to put companies like Disqus and Livefyre out of business? Facebook's 600-plus million strong network is a strong argument as it allows what we imagine to be a simple and easy implementation. The only thing that gives us pause is the continued resistance we've seen from users to adopt the idea that they visibly use their Facebook identity - their real, linked name - in other places on the Web. Most other commenting systems offer a variety of options, while Facebook will offer just one - Facebook.

Unless, of course, Peter Kafka was correct, but we haven't seen that functionality mentioned or in use quite yet. According to TechCrunch, the new commenting system will only allow one other identity: Yahoo. Apparently Facebook is working with other parties, but we have yet to see two big players get in the game yet: Twitter and Google. Can these companies work together on this one? Will Facebook be willing to give up control over the one thing it has sought domination over - your online identity?

More Updates

This experiment also introduces a new way to view ratings. Just a few weeks ago, YouTube abandoned its star ratings in favor of a like/dislike system. In this new experiment, YouTube will now show exactly how many people likes and disliked a given video. Until now, any video you likes was also saved as a "favorite." Starting today, likes aren't automatically saved as favorites anymore.

To round up today's updates, YouTube will also start to surface "Most Liked" videos in various places on the site. According to today's announcement, the YouTube team hopes that "'most liked' becomes a reliable signal that helps you find quality videos to watch."

Fixing YouTube Comments: Is it Possible?

As we noted earlier this year, the new watch pages feature a far more minimalist design than YouTube's current layout. With today's updates, however, YouTube isn't trying to tweak the site's design as much as the comment culture on the service. It'll be interesting to see if these tweaks will help to bring up the level of discussion on the site, or if giving this much prominence to the uploader's comments will actually reduce the overall number of comments people will post on YouTube.

A vulgar comment was made by a reader of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website on Friday on an article about the strangest things you've ever eaten. The headline was practically asking for a juvenile response and, thanks to the anonymity of the internet, that's exactly what happened. In the comments section of the article, one user posted a single word response referring to a part of a woman's anatomy. Of course, the site's moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this juvenile was intent on having their say.

But this time, instead of just deleting the comment in question, the site's director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum, did a little sleuthing too. He found that the commenter's IP address was coming from a local school...and that's where this story starts to get interesting.

Greenbaum contacted the school and made them aware of the situation. In his defense, he probably thought he was simply tattle-telling on a naughty student who would learn a valuable lesson about internet anonymity and would have to sit through a week's detention or something of the like. Instead, he cost a school employee his job.

Yes, as it turns out, the commenter in question wasn't a juvenile after all, just someone with a juvenile mind. Greenbaum learned of the firing when the school phoned him back six hours later to report their findings. They had confronted the employee and he had resigned.

Crossing the Line? Or Justice Served?

The question being hotly debated now is did Greenbaum go too far? Or did the commenter get what they deserved?

Mathew Ingram, the blogger and communities editor for Toronto's The Globe and Mail, writes on his personal blog that his paper's site has seen hundreds or even thousands of comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum saw, but he would never - and has never - contacted someone's workplace about them. He calls Greenbaum's actions "over-the-top" and apparently, many commenters on STLtoday.com's website agree, calling out Greenbaum over this incident.

And yet Greenbaum seems to show no remorse, responding to one commenter who accused him of hating moderating so much that he decided to get someone fired by saying: "Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com's Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the 'submit' key."

Sixteen pages of comments now follow that initial interaction, and the majority of them seem to agree that Greenbaum crossed a line, save for the occasional concerned parent who didn't like the idea of this vulgarity-posting person hanging around their children instead of doing his job.

Lesson to Be Learned: Watch What You Say!

We can't blame Greenbaum for the sleuthing bit - any blogger will tell you they've been tempted to hunt down the identities of nasty commenters from time to time. But calling someone's work? That's just wrong.

Yet while Greenbaum may have been seriously misguided to do what he did, this should be another sobering reminder to anyone trolling the net that what you type may come back and haunt you one day. There's no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their "real" name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. "With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior," he writes.

That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that the STLtoday website allows anonymous comments. When you make that choice, then you have to expect that some of them will need moderation - it's just part of the job. Regardless of the site's policies about vulgarity, phoning the employer seems like an over-reaction to the incident. But that's just our opinion. What do you think?

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

More Noise to Signal.

Bloggers have always been somewhat nervous about 'comment fragmentation' when it comes to services like Blogged, but there can be no doubt that these services also bring new readers to these blogs. The new widget that Blogged introduced today should help to alleviate some of these fears, as it will allow bloggers to showcase the discussions about their posts on Blogged back to their blogs.

After this redesign, Blogged definitely feels like a mix between Google News and the Facebook news feed, which is not a bad thing. The blog directory, which once formed the basis of Blogged, has now been relegated to the back pages of the site, though it still provides a valuable service in its own right.

Fytch claims their technology allows for more "freedom of speech" since you're now able to leave comments on any site on the web even if the site doesn't have a commenting system in place. Plus, the comments left on a site using Fytch can't be moderated or deleted by the site's owners.

The service seems most similar to Glue, a social browsing plugin which lets you identify what books, movies, and music your friends are into by tracking users' activities on the web and then sharing that along with your personal comments with your online network. However, unlike Glue, Fytch doesn't operate as a browser plugin. (Glue is limited to IE and Firefox only). Instead, all that's required to use Fytch is a browser bookmarklet. For some reason, their website identifies this as a "Safari bookmarklet" but it actually works in any web browser.

Before you can start using Fytch, you have to create a Fytch account. However, you're able to sign in using Facebook Connect, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, or OpenID, so the process is relatively painless.

Using Fytch

To leave a comment, the process is simple. You click the bookmarklet, then click a button on the toolbar which appears so that you can leave your comment. This activity takes place in a pop-up window of sorts which hovers over the web page itself as opposed to a sidebar window, as many co-browsing services have used in the past.

There's also a "Fytch Dashboard" where you can track the comments on your favorite sites, your comments with replies, and your Fytch friends list.

Using a feature called Fytch channels, you can find sites based on category as opposed to a specific URL. For example, there are channels like "Sports," "Computers and the Web," "Travel and Going Out," etc. Supposedly, you can track topics with a special button but - call us blind - we didn't see it. Instead, Channel pages seem to feature Digg-like voting buttons for promoting comments up or voting them down.

Also, when browsing the specific channel's page, if you click on a particular headline, you'll see options to add that site to either "My Favorites" or "My Radar." Unfortunately, these choices are a bit confusing since there doesn't seem to be a specific section of the pop-up dashboard for tracking favorites (it's only on the website itself), and clicking "My Radar" will actually have you then tracking the comments by that user on the site, not all the comments on the site itself.

More useful is the "Add Website to My Radar" option, which lets you enter in the URL of a site to track instead. We wish an option to track a website would be added to the main Fytch toolbar, though.

Finally, on the Fytch website, a section called "The Pulse" tracks hot topics in a hand-picked list of sites with a lot of Fytcher comments.

Issues and Challenges

Although you have the option to choose between English and German on the site's homepage, this preference doesn't copy over to the comments themselves as you browse around the site's Channels. That means you'll end up seeing a lot of comments in the language you didn't choose. For now, German seems to be more popular - probably because the company is based there.

Another problem we experienced was removing a user we were tracking in Fytch. Although the user appeared on our My Fytch page, going to their profile didn't give us the option to "unfollow" them, only the option to follow them (but we already were!). As it turns out, the "remove" option for deleting sites and users is tucked away under a small "edit" button on the main My Fytch page. We think that's something that should be more prominently placed on the pop-up dashboard.

While Fytch does make it easy to leave comments on any website, it faces the same challenges of any new startup relying on user-inputted data: it needs more users before it really becomes attractive. Besides, the majority of the sites you would want to track have their own commenting systems already built-in. Unless you feel you're being heavily censored there, you may not see the value in using Fytch instead, especially since your comments would be seen by a much smaller audience.

However, we like the way Fytch has implemented their service - a bookmarklet! Finally, a company that thinks the browser itself is the future, not another downloadable app. Since they're still in beta, we'll give them time to work out the other kinks we mentioned. If you want to try Fytch yourself, you can sign up here.

Installing Echo is just as easy as installing the plugins of its competitors like Intense Debate or Disqus - which is dealing with a major spam problem these days. JS-Kit provides plugins for WordPress and Blogger, as well as a code-snippet for other blogging platforms.

The Best Things in Life Aren't Free

It's important to point out, though, that the most interesting features, including real-time updates and comment aggregation from third-party sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are not available in the free version of Echo. The free version includes most of the core features of Echo, including the ability to share comments on Twitter and Facebook, nested replies, moderation tools, and customization.

For $98 a year, paying users will get access to Echo's aggregation features and real-time updates. JS-Kit also offers a white-label solution with priority support, as well as OEM integration.

It's good to see some development in the blog commenting market again. After a flurry of announcement and product releases last year, development and new product releases markedly slowed down this year, even though the growth of Twitter and Facebook only intensified the problem of comment fragmentation.

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.

Even more impressive is that these statistics are for Mollom's public servers only and don't include message processing on private servers operated for large-volume clients, such as Netlog, an online social portal for European youth.

Mollom set up dedicated servers in Netlog's data center to provide automated around-the-clock monitoring and custom-trained content classifiers. Mollom's servers analyze more than 50 messages per second for Netlog, adding up to an additional 4 million messages per day that are not counted in the latest milestone.

Large sites such as Netlog are turning increasingly to Mollom for its ability to filter spam in near real-time. Another site, popular citizen journalism hub NowPublic, had been receiving almost 25,000 spam posts per day before implementing Mollom's service. After NowPublic installed Mollom, the number of legitimate comments by users jumped 180%, while spam comments fell to nearly zero.

Taking into account the traffic from the 10,000 websites that Mollom protects, Mollom currently processes up to 150 million messages a month, making it one of the largest website spam filtering services available today.

But Mollom is not content to rest on its past achievements. The company is currently changing the architecture of its back-end, which will make the software learn faster and make its actions easier to debug, analyze, and oversee.

Mollom offers its services in tiers, with products targeted at small blogs, mid-sized sites, and large enterprise-level Web properties. Mollom Free, designed for small blogs and sites with small posting volumes, is provided free of charge to the Web community, while Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium are commercial services designed for sites with higher volumes and reliability requirements. More information about its service plans is available on Mollom's website.

For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.

Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."

This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.

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.

The addition of these social features has brought the problem of spam. Two major challenges arise from trying to control website spam. First, visitors may lose their motivation to comment or contribute content because they are required so often to prove that they are human and not spam by registering. This erodes participation.

Secondly, whether visitors are asked to register or not, site moderation becomes more time-consuming and expensive. Website moderators have to scan comments and other content to find spam instead of interact with the community. And publishing companies have to pay for more site moderators to deal with all the spam on their sites.

NowPublic is a Vancouver-based news network that mobilizes an army of reporters to cover events around the world. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in affected areas than most news organizations have on their entire staff. NowPublic was up against as many as 25,000 spam attempts a day, so it needed a solution that would allow the site to grow faster and more effectively without being slowed by comment spam.

A year ago, NowPublic implemented Mollom, a Web service that protects blogs, social networks, and communities against spam and other unwanted content. Within 12 months, the company had become one of the fastest-growing news organizations in the world, with thousands of reporters in more than 140 countries. In addition to this growth in reporters, NowPublic saw an 180% increase in the average number of comments posted per month by users since implementing Mollom's spam-filtering service.

"Integrating Mollom in NowPublic's systems was quick and easy," says Michael Meyers, co-founder and CTO of NowPublic. "It took only a few hours, and the API service has been fast and 100% reliable. By the end of the first month, we saved more in-person hours alone than Mollom cost us for the year."

Mollom has prevented more than one million spam attempts since it started protecting NowPublic. But NowPublic uses Mollom for more than just comment spam. It uses it to identify bogus profiles, vet new account sign-ups, and protect forums.

Mollom, in effect, removed a major barrier to visitor participation for NowPublic, allowing readers to comment anonymously. "Mollom has been a critical ingredient in our success," adds Michael Tippett, co-founder and CMO. "It has allowed us to open our comments to anonymous users while limiting the ability of spammers to vandalize our site. This has helped us grow our page views and truly tap into the wisdom of crowds."

Mollom also allows NowPublic's website maintainers and editors to focus on providing content instead of removing spam. "Since NowPublic began using Mollom," says Jordan Yerman, NowPublic's Contributor Support Manager, "I've saved at least an hour per day dealing with spam in stories, profiles, comments, etc. Thanks to Mollom, I can be more pro-active than reactive. I have more time to engage and interact with our users."

Other major publishers using Mollom to protect their websites from spam are Sony Music, Warner Bros Records, Netlog, The Economist, Fox Interactive, and the New York Observer.

Visit mollom.com to download Mollom's spam filtering service for your website.