Man, I really need to step up my commenting game. I’m not saying I need to game the system or whatever.. you know what I’m talking about.

Just look at it. It’s not good.

Even if you don’t know what clout is you can guess that three is pretty low. We aren’t playing golf here, the point isn’t to get as low as possible.

What is Disqus clout?

Glad you asked. Without going too deep into what the Disqus comment system is and how it is similar or different to other comment systems (including the one built-in to Wordpress), the high-level overview is that Disqus manages my comments on this blog, as well as comments on thousands of other blogs. Because these comments are managed centrally, on Disqus’ site, this means that people using the system to write a comment only need one login everywhere that Disqus is used.

Aside from the convenience of a single login, this also means that each user gets assigned a clout value. By default the clout value is 1. When you comment on a blog, and someone likes your comment, they have the option of voting your comment up using a small arrow next to the comment. Each vote adds one to your clout. Conversely, they can vote you down as well, taking away a point.

As you can see the official FAQ documentation is deliberately vague. I believe that clout can’t drop below 1 (at least, I’ve never seen negative clout), and right now, having a lot of clout points doesn’t really net you anything awesome except a certain kind of Disqus-specific prestige. So far.

So Lets Talk About My Clout

Yeah, so the point is, my clout is in bad shape. I’m not sure if this is because my commenting is spotty and of low-quality (probably) or people are forgivably forgetting to vote my comments up (they are busy, no worries), or there is a vast conspiracy to destroy my clout rating (they follow me wherever I go!) Whatever the reason, I am now on a campaign to get it higher. Take a look at some of my peers’ clout ratings:

Ok, so putting Daniel Ha in there can be seen as cheating since he is a Disqus developer, and pretty much answers all the questions on the Disqus Blog and Forum.

Also, I cleverly didn’t list anyone who had less than 10 clout. Hey, it’s my blog.

What You Can Do To Help

Ok, so my goal is to provide more insightful and interesting comments on a wider variety of blogs using Disqus. What you as a Disqus user can do, to me and anyone else you notice writing a good comment, is to vote more. Or, if you are lazy, you can just vote me up.

I won’t complain. I promise.

Just a quick newsworthy note, this site uses a community-based comment system called Disqus.  I’ve been really happy with it so far, and they just made it better!

According to their blog, they now have more information in their popup profile. This is the bubble of info you get when you hover over someone’s picture in the comments section here or in any other Disqus-enabled blog.

The popup profile now not only lists the Disqus user’s registered services, but also their most recent comments and their last tweet, if they are on Twitter.

457999405Louis Gray has a great write-up on different A-list blogger’s takes on the thorny issue of comment systems that work in tandem with RSS feeds to allow commenting outside of the blogs the articles were originally written on.

One of the more frequently mentioned suggestions for avid Google Reader users is the addition of comments to the service, so RSS readers could respond to blog posts, either directly from the reader and back to the originating blog, or within the Google Reader community itself, in effect, becoming a social network. But while Google Reader has not yet enabled comments, other services are, and it seems the excitement of adding this capability is hardly universal – and its opponents have gone so far as to call it “outrageous” or “theft”.

- louisgray.com: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?: Silicon Valley Blog

Personally, I believe that a large part of what makes social media exciting is being able to contribute to the conversation. And increasingly as I develop this site, and interact with other bloggers and find new sites, it becomes more and more onerous for me to have to register myself with every new blog, leave my comment, and then wander off, perhaps never to return.

Sometimes I agree to have replies emailed to me, and then I can’t figure out how to turn them off again. Other times I read the other comments but I don’t know who anyone is, because often the comments are anonymous, or they only put in a first name and no URL

As a little background, I come from using LiveJournal for many years. I know, I know. Ugh, LJ. And you are right — It’s a closed system with a lot of fluff and drama. But what is really cool about it is that 95% of the comments you get on your entries are from other LJ bloggers. You can go visit their blogs. You can meet new people. In a way, they got the community thing right.. but then they walled it off, and now there are people who have a HUGE following in LiveJournal who can’t break out because their readership might not follow them.

When I recently discovered Disqus, I felt a breath of home, hokey as it may sound. Suddenly, here was a plug-in system that immediately gives me back that community. Better yet, I can bring my community in to the world of RSS using gReader or other tools! It’s like using StumbleUpon but somehow better because it has an API and works with WordPress and Tumblr and other services!

Anyway, go read the article linked up there. Get the rest of the story. I’m going to go check out Shyftr.

Update: Not in love with Shyftr. I’ll keep poking at it, but I can tell you one thing right now — no keyboard accelerators. For me, this is essential. Page Up/Page Down and mouse clicks don’t make for a great feed reading experience.

In my last post I asked the question, “how can I show how many comments my entries have in my feed?”  I actually sent an email to TechDirt (since I read their feed and it has that feature) and Dennis Yang (who is on Twitter too!) wrote me a very nice explanatory email.  Apparently, this isn’t as unusual a question as I supposed, because FeedBurner has already thought of it.  Their support is built in to a feature called FeedFlare.

FeedFlare does many things, like allowing the feed owner to add subscribe and email this links to each entries, plus (obviously) number of comments.  I think this cements my plans to move to using FeedBurner, there are just too many compelling reasons to not do it, and, it’s all free.  That’s probably the best reason.

So how does this relate to Disqus and gReader, you are asking?  Well, Disqus (pronounced discuss, I am guessing) is an online commentary-tracking system that “plugs in” to a number of different blogs and sites, allowing someone to sign up once (sort of like OpenID) but also keep track of all their comments across all the sites using Disqus.. where other Disqus users can follow their comments (like Twitter)  and build a social network as well.  I could write a whole review of Disqus and I think I will, but not today.

Moving on to gReader, I found out about this on the Disqus blog.  What this cool Firefox extension does is enable active Disqus comment tracking and responding from within Google Reader!  And if you use the bookmarklet, you can enable commenting on any page, even if that site doesn’t have explicit Disqus support!  Very sweet.

I have a bunch of work to do actually, I am now itching on getting this extension installed, as well as switching this blog over to FeedBurner.