Two weeks ago I attended the latest event of the Boston Web Innovators Group. It was well worth the time. 3 "main dish" presentations, 6 "side dish" demo tables, and plenty of time to network with roughly 400 interesting people. If you're in the Boston area, look for me at the next "WebInno" event on Nov. 6. One of the people I met suggested that I check out SezWho.

Let's start with the pitch:

SezWho is a distributed context, rating and reputation service for blogs, forums, wikis and other sites that deal with user generated content.

And:

SezWho is a social-media service that enables site owners to increase engagement with their community and to drive traffic by cross-connecting islands of content based on community participants.

The download page lists plug-ins for Wordpress and Movable Type, with other platforms "coming soon". Once installed by a blog owner, each comment gets several new features:

• a visual rating (5 red boxes, filled-in with what appears to be half-point increments)

• a pop-up profile for each commenter that shows a list of recent comments

• a question for readers: "Was this comment useful to you?"

There's only Yes or No; the numerical rating is determined by a SezWho algorithm. To answer the question, readers must first supply their email address. (Some will object, but I think it's a reasonable step to help reduce gaming of the system.)

A tip for SezWho: I find the current format busy and distracting -- though that should be easy to fix. (And a gripe: make unique title tags for different pages on the site!)

Here are write-ups from blogs that have deployed SezWho:

• Read/WriteWeb's New Comments Feature: SezWho (July 22, 2007) ... note that SezWho founder Jitendra Gupta is an occasional guest blogger at Read/WriteWeb

• VentureBeat: SezWho lets you have say on blog commenters (June 25, 2007)

• sramana mitra (a serial entrepreneur): A Service for Active Netizens (July 19, 2007)

• ifacethoughts: The CommentPower (SezWho) Solution (April 24, 2007)

Chuq Von Rospach has many years experience with online community, so his initial enthusiasm is worth a look ... though he hasn't adopted the system yet.

Several other companies are tackling comments from different directions, e.g.

BigSwerve (which was in the TechCrunch40 DemoPit)

BigSwerve's crawler aggregates comments to discover the underlying social network that is created as a result of this implicit behavior and provides a view into the conversation. Users can follow the comments for a given person and discover new content by seeing where other people are engaged.

coComment (the market leader?)

coComment keeps track of all the online conversations you're following in one convenient place, and informs you whenever something is added to a conversation.

With the browser extension, comments are automatically collected, no need to remember where you commented, coComment does it for you.

Co.mments

Use co.mments to bookmark posts you want to follow. It tracks new comments for you, so you don't miss out. You can see all the new comments from your tracking page, or subscribe to the feed.

Disqus

Disqus is about enhancing online discussion. We are starting with a better comment system for your blog, backed and synced with your own dedicated forum.

Track replies to your comments, follow others' posts, and claim your identity across websites.

Intense Debate

We provide a substitute to your current blog comment system that is feature packed!

In the comments to a post on Web Worker Daily, Jitendra contrasted his service with coComment:

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…

Comment management is long overdue for innovation. In a nice roundup post, VC Brad Feld called comments The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere (July 21, 2007) with links to Joel Spolsky, Dave Winer and Fred Wilson. Check them out.

Which "comment management" products and services do you like?