You web workers are the passionate sort – we can tell by the number of comments we get here (and we love you for it!). But for most people, leaving well thought out, useful comments on blog entries is an act of pure charity: your effort in doing so is largely lost when things scroll off the front page. Wouldn’t it be nice if the people who took the time to reflect and help others in comments could build up their social capital and be recognized?
That’s the premise behind SezWho, a relatively new service that is trying to turn blog comments into a cross-site social network. The idea is pretty simple: blog owners install a plug-in (WordPress or Movable Type at the moment, though they plan to support other platforms in the future), which adds AJAX functionality and a connection to the SezWho service to their blog comments. At that point, readers can rate any comment by clicking buttons. SezWho keeps track of ratings on a commenter-by-commenter basis, not just on a single blog, but across all blogs in their system. At any point you can see the reputation of anyone in the system, as well as all of the comments they’ve made and the ratings that they’ve garnered.
Will it work? Well…maybe. There are two big hurdles to this sort of system succeeding. The first is that it faces the usual chicken-and-egg issue of needing to spread widely to be useful, and needing to be useful to spread widely. Right now you can see SezWho in action on a few sites like Read/Write Web and VentureBeat; it seems like SezWho ought to be promoting the heck out of a directory of enabled sites to try to build an ecosystem here, but they aren’t doing so yet. The second issue is that, as sites like SlashDot and Digg have shown, reputation systems inevitably get gamed as they gain in popularity. SezWho says they’re using “a proprietary page-rank-like recursive algorithm based on reputation score of rater and commenter, their frequency of participation, time of interaction, consistency of participation and topic of discussion” to rate people. As they grow, the challenge will be to keep this algorithm tuned so that its results match our gut feeling of who is providing useful feedback. If they can do that, this could ultimately be a service that grows some legs.
coComment has been doing almost the same thing for a while now and has a decent sized user base. It would take some pretty awesome features for me to switch.
Seems similar to CoComment.
Does CoComment allow folks to rate individual comments and display that rating right in the post? That seems to be the big difference between the two services.
I’m not sure I like the idea of “rating” individual comments. It’s such a subjective measure. As we’ve seen on Digg, sometimes the most inane and nearly offensive comments get dugg up simply according to where the mob mentality is at that given moment. The value of one’s comments are different depending on the blog and I’m not sure an overall rating across multiple sites is a very good measure of credibility, especially if not a lot of sites are using the system.
The main difference is that SezWho drives the traffic related to comments to the site where as CoComment provides the service for commenters by consolidating all the comments in one place…As such SezWho sells to Site owners where as coComments sells to commenters by mostly providing the service via a browser tool bar…
You be the judge…Jitendra
I use coComment a lot, and love it, but I’m not sure it has the same rating facility. Perhaps Jitendra and Laurent should talk about loading up coComment’s existing data to get SezWho off the ground quickly?
(PS – why can’t I use SezWho here on WWD?)
Mike,
Great Analysis…We do have the chicken and egg problem but to a lot lesser degree than usual…the reason is that when we go up on a site, we connect the existing older posts on the site with the new posts (all within the same blog) based on the commenters. These links are then visible to any user who sees the profile of a commenter on a new post. By showing these links within the context of newer discussions and on demands, we drive traffic within the blog from new posts to older posts…
Also what we see is that a lot of the commenters on a blog are repeat commenters and as a result there are plenty of links for everybody to see and click on…We have seen this drive a fair amount of traffic to a blog … even without us having a whole lot of data.
Good tip on promoting the existing sites…We are going to do more of that.
Thanks,
Jitendra
SezWho
[...] SezWho offers portable reputations: Will it work? Well…maybe. There are two big hurdles to this sort of system succeeding. Continue reading. [...]
you missed the biggest problems..
1. most of the blogs don’t have many comments and enough visitors to have meaningful voting/ranking..for the ones who have be it dailykos or weblogs blogs or gawker media or mashable they have something in house..bloggers are known to be penny pincher so even if others decide to have it they will build something of their own..btw, boing boing does this comments in very smart way..
2. ppl who comment often and are very active will always make sure their comments also rank high …they obviously have time of their lifetime to play such games..people who post occasionally will get ignored..also occasional legit commenter might get brunt of these UGC champs..it will hurt blogger in long run because conversations will be monotonous
[...] fixes and everything about blogging, especially with WordPress. Go ahead, subscribe to our feed!SezWho Offers Portable Reputations : Web Worker has a thorough writeup on the SezWho service which allows commenter reputation and [...]
Here’s my piece on SezWho:
http://sramanamitra.com/2007/07/19/a-service-for-active-netizens/