Politics

Tools for Transparency: Enhance Blog Comments with Disqus

By Scott Stadum

You don’t often think of the comment section as playing an important role in blog messaging since I bet it doesn’t get the same amount of love as the other features of your site.

Regardless, the comment section plays many important roles, from adding further context and data to your story to connecting your readers to pushing the dialogue further along to helping search engines better index your content. And thankfully the technology behind commenting systems has come a long way, making it incredibly simple to log in and contribute to the conversation.

Disqus is a favorite of mine, though there are many other tools out there (like CoComment, IntenseDebate and AboutEcho).

What makes Disqus so awesome? Besides being a simple piece of code you add to your site, there are a number of features that make it quite useful:

• You can log in to comment using accounts from Twitter, Facebook or OpenID.
• You can find related comments on Twitter, Digg, YouTube and other sites and display them with your comments.
• Commenters can easily share their comments to your posts on other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, making your content more accessible.
• Replies are threaded and in real-time.
• You can track influential commenters across all sites using Disqus through Disqus Profile, a verified commenting profile.
• Using the recently launched Disqus Analytics, you can find popular posts, loyal commenters, login methods, activity trends and other important data related to commenting.

Do you already use any of the service mentioned above? How do you like them? Have you found them to be useful? I know commenting strategies can sound pretty vanilla, but I think they’re really useful in expanding dialogue and help people learn more about your content. What do you think?

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on October 28, 2010 (boomark / email).