I've just installed a new commenting feature on AWV from Disqus. The system has been around for a couple of months and is designed to either be a replacement to your existing commenting system (e.g. Wordpress and Typepad) or will allow comments to be added to systems where they didn't exist before (e.g. Tumblr).
Disqus turns your comments into a threaded conversation complete with profiles and a rating system (here's a good post showing it in action). Another great feautre is video comments. If you already have a Seesmic account you can use that to record a comment but if you haven't you can still go ahead and record one. Who's going to be brave enough and post the first video comment on AWV?
You don't need to signup to make a comment but any comments that you make will need to be approved. If you want to use the extra features you will need to have a Disqus account. The signup process is easy and once logged in you can comment on any blog that has it installed.
There are a few different reasons for wanting to replace the Typepad comments with a better system. The Typepad system is slow for users and having to make them type a CAPTCHA each time that they want to comment is a pain. Another reason is that by having more features it may encourage more people to interact through the comments. I'm not sure how Disqus will cope with spam messages but it does allow you to easily remove comments and block problem commenters/spammers from within the blog post.
Disqus can be used on Typepad (Pro accounts only), Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and Movable Type. The Typead installation is a bit of a pain especially if like me you have already fiddled around with your templates and have a ton of files to publish. It appears to be really simple to install on the other systems.
You can learn more about Disqus here.
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