Trying out Intense Debate
By Steve Outing on Mar 14, 2008 in Blogging
Next time you make a comment here, you’ll notice that I switched from the default Wordpress commenting feature to using Intense Debate. Let me know what you think of it, please.
Intense Debate is a new company based here in Boulder, and I know its recently appointed CEO, Tom Keller. What they’re doing definitely looks interesting. The idea is to take the vanilla user commenting system that’s typical of most blogs and supercharge it.
I actually tried this a couple months ago on another Wordpress project of mine and had trouble, then uninstalled it. But I gave it another chance on this blog and found that it’s been improved, apparently. Installing and importing old comments went off without a hitch.
On Apr 22, 2008, Jerry W. Lewis said:
I agree with you that there might be a better name for Citizen Journalism, but whatever it is, newspapers have to become much better at involving their readers beyond the typical letter to the editor. More need to integrate more robust comment tools, since already, that is becoming a very good way to generate traffic into their sites. I've also been watching the Examiner's web sites, particularly in Denver, where Anschutz is attempting to create a virtual newspaper presence, perhaps testing the waters for an actual print product. Maybe I missed it, but even your Editor and Publisher column does not have a good comment tool, just a link to send a letter to the editor. So here is the magazine covering the newspaper industry, already lagging the community-building of most blogs.