I wrote about IntenseDebate on July 15th. They have an awesome commenting system. Actually, to call it a commenting system is a severe disservice to IntenseDebate. That is like calling the Hope Diamond just another rock. They are continually revising their offering, adding more features, and improving the aesthetics. If you run a blog or you are thinking about beginning one, you really need to include IntenseDebate as part of your game plan.

Here are some of the cool features available as of this writing:

• Comment Threading – allows you to reply to one individual or post a new comment. Indention allows you to follow the various levels of commenting.
• Reply-By-Email – you can respond to and moderate comments by email.
• Importing and Exporting of Comments – once you use IntenseDebate, you won’t need the export function. But the import function allows you to bring in the comments from your current system so you won’t lose a single valuable comment.
• Commenter Profiles – gives you, the commenter a profile so your opinions are not lost in cyberspace. Also allows you, the blog site owner, the ability to see who is commenting, where else they are commenting, and who else is following their comments.
• Reputation Points & Comment Voting – commenters gain reputation points by the quantity and quality of their comments. Comment voting counts for or against your quality of comment.
• Moderation & Blacklisting – open up or lock down the comments left on your site as much as you like. There is a plethora of options available to moderate, filter profanity, approval and deletion of comments.
• Widgets (a lot of cool and useful ones) – get widgets to display your blog’s comment stats, most recent comments on your blog, most popular posts, your most recent comments, and who the top IntenseDebaters are.
• RSS Reader Integration & Tracking – integrated into the Google and Bloglines RSS readers.
• Twitter – ability to send a Tweet on post-by-post basis.
• FriendFeed – retrieves comments from FriendFeed when made in context of your blog and publishes them back to your blog.
• Gravatar – a gravatar is a global avatar. A Gravatar is an item you can setup once and use in multiple places. Change your picture in one spot instead of many. IntenseDebate supports Gravatars in your profile.
• OpenID – OpenID does for information what a Gravatar does for images. In a perfect world, everyone would have an OpenID and only need one username and password to enter any site. IntenseDebate supports OpenID.
• HTML Formatting – for all of you who know a little HTML, you can customize your comments with some HTML supported tags.
• Wordpress Plugin – integrating IntenseDebate into your Wordpress powered blogging system couldn’t be easier: grab the plugin, upload it in to your plugin directory, and enable. Viola!

As I said, these are the features available as of this writing. I have it on good authority that they are diligently working on more. My descriptions are summaries of the features. Visit their newly redesigned site for full descriptions of the features. Click here to get started.

Just to be clear, I am in no way affiliated with IntenseDebate. I have no vested interest. They have a solid product, responsive and competent support, and they are currently offering it at an unbeatable price – FREE! I advocate any service that gives more value than they ask in return. If you have or know of any other products and/or services that meet the aforementioned, let me know and I will evaluate it. If I agree, I will write a post about it.

In my last post I also wrote about a t-shirt contest that IntenseDebate was having. I created a video and had some fellow entrepreneurs advocate for me. Well, Mr. Koenig didn’t disappoint and he was a man of his word. So to keep my end of the bargain, I said I would show off my t-shirt once I received it. (Note to Michael: Consider my word kept.)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.