Reblogging Comments

If you visited this blog over the weekend you saw this post which looks like this:

Comment_post

That post was a reblog of that comment left by Joe Lazarus. I was able to reblog it with one click using Disqus.  This is a feature I’ve been asking for since Disqus launched and it finally arrived today.

Here’s how it works. If you have a disqus profile (you probably do if you leave comments here regularly), go to that profile and give disqus the login credentials to your blog. Then whenever you see a comment you want to reblog, hit the reblog link that is after the comment right next to the reply link. It’s that simple.

As I explained to Alan at Centernetworks:

i regularly get great comments on my blog and want to be able to elevate them to the front page easily. this does that for me.

i also sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are full blown
blog posts and i’ve wanted a way to showcase them on my blog while
recognizing the blog they came from. this does that as well.

That was a comment I left on Alan’s blog. If he was using Disqus, I could have posted it here with all of the relevant links with one click.

When stuff like this gets easier, more people will do it and commenting will become more popular because your comments will sometimes end up as blog posts where you get the credit.

Disqus is all about making commenting easier and better for everyone. And reblogging is a big step in the right direction.

I am going to try to reblog a comment at least 2 to 3 times a week. Hopefully I’ll do it even more.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Bill DAlessandro

    Awesome Fred. Another great feature from Disqus – you guys are really changing interaction on the web.Just getting into reblogging – loved your Obama quote on Tumblr earlier, and the article it came from – reblogged it with one click. Pretty cool that I will be able to do this across the web with Disqus now too.

  2. Robert Seidman

    Agreed, another great feature from Disqus. Though trying to convince anyone with control issues over the comments may be tantamount to asking the Pope to convert to Judaism. But so far, I find it well worth the conversion. It would be even nicer if it were possible to reblog comments from our own blog’s comments section without having to visit Disqus first.

    1. andyswan

      No one owns comments. The comments own you. 🙂

  3. gregorylent

    disqus could be getting a bit clunky, there are sites http://www.inquisitr.com/26… where the reply tab just refreshes the page, have lost a few comments too .. no big deal, i love it.

    1. obscurelyfamous

      Thanks for the love, but any issue is a big deal to me. I have not seen any instances of what you describe but I’ll keep an eye out (what you describe is actually not possible with how Disqus works, but it could be a result of other combined quirks of the page).

      1. vincentvw

        What I occasionally get is that the comment is on eternal refresh after I post it, and I have to refresh the whole page. It doesn’t lose the comment however, and I think I’ve only seen it happening when I look at the page through the Netvibes-interface (i.e. I go to a feed, and don’t use the feed-view, but have it take me to the site within the frame).

        1. vincentvw

          It just happened, so here’s a screenshot: http://img.skitch.com/20080… The little circle just keeps turning until I refresh the whole page.

        2. obscurelyfamous

          I did verify your issue. It has more to do with Netvibes than Disqus, however I will look into a workaround for this use case.Explanation: Disqus refreshes the page upon a comment post, but Netvibes is nesting this within its own Iframe which prevents Disqus from properly refreshing.

  4. Mrinal

    retweets, reblog/comments, friendfeed – how can we aggregate it all this well, Fred?

    1. fredwilson

      when i reblog a comment onto my front page, it really doesn’t need to be aggregated

  5. falicon

    very cool as I’m pretty into the whole reblogging idea right now…the ‘next’ thing I would love for them to do is give you the power to reblog the entire conversation (since to me, a lot of value in comments comes from the context of the overall conversation)…I think you usually need the whole thread for people to really benefit…overall though I really think this is a step in a good direction.We’ll have to see how people really use it before it’s clear what the next real step is.

  6. slowblogger

    I have long felt the need to save my comments somewhere, as I found myself writing (and often enjoying) more comments than writing on my own blog. So, I have been using some solutions to keep my comments somewhere.I first used Cocomment, which was probably the most optimized that purpose. But they did not provide a good UI, fonts being too small etc, and they did not work in some platform (like Disqus, understandably).So, I switched to Tumblr, which is more robust, though it takes a few more seconds with Tumblr than with Cocomment.Recently, I started considering using WordPress with Pressthis. The decision will be based on whether I would like to have the comment blog and the regular blog separate, which is as-is, or integrated.Personally, Disqus did not fit in my own blogging/commenting pattern so far, though I think it is very neat. I may try the reblogging feature a bit.

    1. slowblogger

      Sorry for posting the same comment at http://www.avc.com/a_vc/200…. I would like to delete that one, but I don’t see any delete button.

  7. SimplyNoting

    Hey Fred,”Long time listener, first time caller.” I’m an engineering grad student at Stanford and I frequently comment on company blogs just to ask questions and maybe provide constructive critiques. I spend a lot of time on these comments — for example, I just wrote on Xobni’s blog (against an inflammatory troll) about my honest view on the market for this product (which was skeptical)http://www.xobni.com/blog/2…I even did some research! But check out the response; clearly SimplyTired did not read my comment (mine was admittedly, kinda long).I feel like the problem with comments is that they cannot measure in anyway their intellectual depth (or even their word length) even though they can measure their popularity. I made some very specific points about information retrieval and so on, but they actually seemed kinda lost on my “combatant”. Is there any technology which can fix this?Anyway, Fred, I think this is a great idea!

    1. andyswan

      Twitter can help. Get started on that and before you know it, you’ll be putting no more than 140 characters into everything. Simplify 🙂

  8. Jason Preston

    Reblogging comments is a good idea, and a great way to keep your community active, engaged, and commenting responsibly. I know this is something that many newspapers struggle with, and I think a big part of it is the way they insist on rolling their own five-years-behind-the-times comment systems.I also think it would be cool to widgetize the reblogged comment, much like the NYTimes has “comments of the moment,” which I’ve blogged about before.Basically, if there were a place on my sidebar where I could pick and choose to feature any given one, two, or three comments that I felt like. This seems like a natural extension to the “latest comments” widget.

    1. fredwilson

      I have come to believe that if its not in the main column, it gets ignored. A river of content, is what it seems most people want to consume