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.

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.

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.

Izea, formerly known as PayPerPost, has a pretty sketchy history, but also a lot of users. Izea is a "social media marketing" company that pays bloggers small amounts of money for posting blog posts about Izea's advertisers. Izea's PayPerPost product especially came under heavy fire from bloggers in its early days, as it didn't require disclosure of the advertising content from its bloggers and was generally seen as misleading. Even today, there are still questions about Izea's disclosure policy.

SezWho is going to work with Izea's SocialSpark, a marketplace and community which connects advertisers with bloggers who are willing to write sponsored posts. SocialSpark will start using SezWho to provide its users with a way of tracking blog comments and reputation.

Given that Google has already banned all PayPerPost users by indexing them with a Pagerank of zero, it seems Izea is interested in creating a different ratings system for its users by leveraging SezWho's technology.

Entrecard

Entrecard provides bloggers with a blog-to-blog advertising widget and will give SezWho users who receive ratings of 4 stars or more with credits to advertise on its network of blogs. This is an interesting approach, as it connects reputation with a direct reward. Through this deal, Entrecard will get a stronger foothold among bloggers who are already working with SezWho and probably hopes that SezWho's users will return to actually buy real advertising after having tried out the free ads.

Creative Weblogging

SezWho's deal with Creative Weblogging, an international blog network, is probably the most straightforward of these announcements. Creative Weblogging will enable SezWho's technology among its network of blogs. SezWho advertises that it can greatly increase the number of comments on blogs. This is something the Creative Weblogging network could definitely use, as most of its blogs are currently getting close to zero comments on average.

SezWho

Overall, this is an interesting, yet somewhat desperate, move by SezWho. In terms of publicity, it has been in the shadow of similar ventures like Disqus and Intense Debate. By adding a number of more formal and visible partners, SezWho looks like it is trying to gain back a bit of mind share among publishers.

At the same time, though, at least two of the partners they have chosen, Izea and Creative Weblogging, don't exactly have great reputations. Izea has a history of deceptive advertising and a lot of content on Creative Weblogging looks rather spammy, too (though there are also a few good blogs in the network as well). Entrecard, while an interesting service, is also mostly a niche player, which will probably get a lot more out of this partnership than SezWho itself.

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan began developing Tejit in 2007 as a personal project when he became frustrated reading duplicate content from the 1000+ blogs he had bookmarked. Since then, Tejit has expanded its analysis capabilities across millions of blogs. Tejit's semantic-analysis engine uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic matching technology to identify topics, sentiments and entities present in web content.

A Flawed Tradition

According to SezWho CEO, Jitendra Gupta,

The traditional method of content discovery based on the similarity of content is not adequate for connecting conversation across social sites in a meaningful way. A new level of context-sensitive, semantic discovery is required to reflect all the layers of users' participation across the social web, and to track their contributions in a way that is universally relevant both within and across communities.

There's no doubt that the traditional rating system for comments has its flaws. In a post titled "Disqus Clout: Fail!", Phil Glockner of Scribkin points out one of the biggest flaws of comment rating systems using Disqus as an example. In the comments section, Louis Gray sums up the problem nicely:

I would expect it rewards those who comment most frequently, and wouldn't be so much a subjective view.

More Than Just A Rating System

Instead of replacing your comment system, SezWho aims to augment the conversations. Keeping the aforementioned flaw in mind, SezWho considers two important factors that: distributed conversations and the people behind them. SezWho provides a meta network information around participants and context. The context has information from various platforms to allow data and content to reside within the community. The service captures valuable information about the history and expertise of individual contributors. Community ratings are only a portion of the cumulative rankings for an overall score.

SezWho provided us with a comparison chart to better demonstrate the differences between what SezWho offers versus competitors Disqus and Intense Debate, which we've previously reviewed.

Adding Noise or Resolving Issues?

With all that SezWho adds, it can be argued that some of it will amount to more noise for users. While, we've previously used SezWho here on ReadWriteWeb to enhance our community, some of our writers are using the less complicated Disqus platform on their personal blogs. We wonder if the amount of blog coverage has also affected SezWho's userbase compared to Disqus, which has seen tremendous coverage since its launch.

With SezWho, other important issues are being tackled beyond their enhanced reputation system such as keeping track of conversations over a plethora of platforms and enabling a more sophisticated way to discover relevant content. SezWho aims to enhance communities rather than replace them,but can they filter the noise that's add everyday?