Yesterday, I saw a breaking news blog entry relating to Outbrain and Disqus. It’s a very small update in the Outbrain widget that detects if Disqus is being used and asks if the person rating an article would like to leave a Disqus comment as well.

Although the integration isn’t huge, it did catch my attention and I decided to install Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain is a plug-in content rating system that also provides recommendations automatically at the end of each article where it is installed. There is no special logins needed to rate an article, just click on the number of stars you think the article deserves and your rating is recorded.

The install was very quick and easy, with one odd hiccup. The hiccup came when I was instructed to paste in a unique activation code for my blog in to the plugin’s control panel.  After hitting the button to attempt activation, I eventually got a ‘timeout’ error. I tried the same steps several times with no joy. 

Eventually, however, I noticed that my blog management page on the Outbrain web site apparently decided I was activated, and allowed the plugin to operate normally. It was all very mysterious and I never actually got the confirmation through the control panel as I should.  But knock on wood, I am up and running.

As you can see in my screenshot, I rated my own article to see if the Disqus integration was working. However, it didn’t ask me to leave a comment.  (I subsequently figured out the ‘comment’ link only appears on the single post page, after the Disqus module loads.)

There are a number of great blogs that I follow that are now using the Outbrain plugin, such as Louis Gray, CenterNetworks, WinExtra, The Inquisitr, and VentureBeat.

I just realized I haven’t linked up a number of posts I’ve done on other sites in the past week or two.  I should correct that.

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Tonight, I got a SMS message from Disqus on Twitter.  The tweet was pretty succinct:

Disqus for WordPress 2.03 released.: This release includes trackback/pingback and pagination support as we.. http://tinyurl.com/5z98kh

That was enough for me!  Disqus’ lack of PingBack support in WordPress was really something that I missed, as you can probably tell from this article’s title.  So, without wasting another minute, I followed the link to the blog entry, and downloaded the new version of the plugin, 2.03.

And, I’m happy to report that it does indeed support trackback and pingback support!  I’ve included a screenshot below.

Disqus TrackBacks

Thanks for your hard work, Disqus team!

I noticed today while browsing my river on Feedly that it ‘enhanced’ one of my del.icio.us bookmarks with commentary from Digg on the same article.  As far as I can tell, it did not find the Digg entry based on the URL, but rather on the title of the article.  Very cool!  Also, the list of other recent del.icio.us bookmarks in the column on the right.

You may have noticed that the URL in question is actually one from Diigo.  I actually have my Diigo annotations being pushed to del.icio.us automatically. Also, not in this screenshot is a link to the original Digg article at the bottom of the comment thread.

How many of you made the switch from Windows 3.11 (or WFW 3.1) to Windows 95? Come on.. I know there’s more of a couple of you that have. What was one of the biggest difference between the two OSs? Better network drivers?  Improved memory management?  Unified driver model?

I would hazard to say that one of the biggest differences was the ability to do most operations in the OS in more than one way.  Sure, now we take it for granted; but back then it was huge.  There were a lot more right-click context menus.  The control panel was completely overhauled.  For the first time in Windows, you were able to tasks such as changing your background image either from the control panel or directly from a right-click on the desktop.

Keep this in mind as we explore Diigo, the web bookmarking research tool and community.  As I researched it for this review, I got the same feeling of having multiple paths to a goal.  The developers tried very hard to let you use the service the way that best fits your workflow.  And that isn’t a bad thing!

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