Disqus to launch new commenting features

Updated

Disqus is going to launch two features to help blog readers track the most interesting comments on a blog or other web site.

Forum and blogging software has been around for many years, but there’s still no easy way to find the best comments within a web site or from across web sites.

Disqus has a two-part answer to this problem. It provides an advanced commenting system that can be added to a blog article page. Features include nested comments — tiered according to the order in which they were left — and a way for readers to vote for or against comments, and spam protection.

The other feature is a forum hosted separately by Disqus that displays comments from a blog according to how recent the post was published and how “hot” the discussion is on a particular post — in other words, how many comments that post has.

But there are many competitors.

VentureBeat — and other blogs, including Read/WriteWeb — have been testing SezWho (see below), which allows readers to rank each others’ comments, creating a reputation system that users can take with them across blogs. Techcrunch just covered Intense Debate, which provides similar reputation tracking to SezWho. We’ve also written on some of the others, such as CoComment. Public Square provides all-in-one online publishing software that includes a built-in social network for commenters.

Fred Wilson’s “A VC” blog has good examples of both the blog commenting system and the separate forum system for his blog, although the service is not yet publicly available.

Disqus is part of Big Head Labs and has received funding from Y Combinator.