ReadWriteWeb

People who use pseudonyms - as opposed to remaining anonymous or using their real identity - are more likely to leave high-quality comments on blogs and other Web sites, according to data released by Disqus.

In addition to leaving more comments, people using pseudonyms are more likely to leave comments that get "likes" from other readers, according to Disqus, which operates blog commenting platforms for about one million Web sites, including ReadWriteWeb.

Comments on blogs, what are they good for? Sometimes it's hard to remember, but you know there's a lot of potential in taking the democratization of publishing to the next level and letting people comment on your blog-written comments on the world.

This evening a fresh spate of debate has rolled over the tech blogosphere about whether it's worth it to allow commenting on blog posts at all. Comment fields are spam magnets, their filled with trollish bile and abuse, they rarely offer meaningful discourse and they're more trouble than they're worth, critics say. Supporters contend otherwise, and as one of those, I offer below seven specific ways that new startups can optimize the discourse after a blog post has been published by its author. If these don't work, maybe nothing will, but I think they are only the beginning. Give me a great Letter to the Editor of an old fashioned magazine, written by a real expert in the field who's read and taken issue with a published article, and I'm in nerd heaven. Surely we can get some of that in the blogosphere. Comments are little tendrils of thought, structured and online. There's no way that's worthless.

Social media is supposed to be all about engagement and authenticity, but sometimes it can feel so distributed and overwhelming that conversations get lost. A new web app called Engag.io has tackled this classic problem and offers a pretty good solution that I think you'll want to check out. It's in private alpha right now but we've got an invite code at the bottom of this post. That someone is making an app like this gives me hope that there are still great ideas that can be built on top of the most basic building blocks of the social web.

Engag.io, which gets its name from being the place for your online engagement input and output, is like an inbox for all your conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Foursquare and blog comments. It's an inbox with analytics. It's built by the team behind content curation company Eqentia. Eqentia is ambitious but a little too complicated; Engag.io is very simple and the value of it will be immediately obvious to many people.

Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

Real-time commenting system Disqus came out this morning with a bunch of numbers, including "10 million" (how many dollars it just secured). The battle for commenting solutions on the Web has clearly not died just because Facebook jumped in the ring.

As a matter of fact, Disqus co-founder and CEO Daniel Ha says the company has grown immensely over recent years and he has the numbers to back it up...Facebook comments, be damned.

Back when I was in graduate school getting my masters in journalism and mass communication, I worked on various "lab projects" which were challenges faced by media organizations that they wanted to tackle but didn't have the means or the resources to do so. So basically, the students at my school were a think tank for the local media. One of the first issues we were tasked with investigating was finding a new way to allow comments for online news stories to be more efficient and less offensive.

Two years ago Danah Boyd's article "Viewing
American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace" mesmerized marketers and tech journalists. Facebook was described as "hegemonic" while MySpace was the haven of "subaltern" teens. Whether Boyd intended it or not, Facebook became characterized as the privileged space of college kids and MySpace was plagued with the perception of lowbrow tackiness. At the time it made sense that a site for the privileged had less traffic. After all, isn't privilege generally exclusive? According to a recent Hitwise blog post Facebook is not only beating MySpace's traffic, it's the second ranked site overall in the US behind Google.

After publishing her book about social capital and the power of social networking,The Whuffie Factor, Tara Hunt is doing what any change agent does. She's changing. She's quit her job, purchased a winnebago and coerced five friends to karaoke across the country with her. Wuffaoke Or Bust is a cross-country road trip where six crooners and one pug will live stream their 13-city karaoke tour from San Francisco to Montreal. Think of it as a Rental Car Rally with a talent competition or Bullrun Rally with geeks instead of "petrolsexuals."

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.