This post is for those of you which have a blog and run Disqus comment system on it.

Firstly, let me tell you the exact story: I haven't noticed this before, but if you look at the source code of a post (post, not main page) of probably all blogs using Disqus (except Web Upd8 and Mashable), and search for some words in the post, you will see them displayed twice: once in the actual post and once in a div with the "disqus_post_message" id, which is not visible on the actual page because it's hidden. This basically means all your posts text exists twice on your blog which is of course not very good in terms of SEO. Even worse, the "disqus_post_message" has the style "display:none", which Google interprets as trying to hide content.

Google launched a new project, Google Sidewiki, which integrates into Google Toolbar. Users with Google Toolbar + Sidewiki can add their own opinions to the discussion of specific web pages. While there are a range of products that already do this sort of thing, Google differentiates with its algorithm.

Google’s explanation of the technology is actually quite succinct, so here is their explanation on the Google Blog:

“In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you’ll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.”

Disqus V3 is being rolled out today and promises to be the biggest change to the product since its inception in 2007.

With the ability to sign on with existing social networking accounts like Facebook or Twitter, Disqus offers lots of advantages to both users and publishers. Users benefit because they get a platform that lets them keep the same identity across multiple sites and easily comment without having to create yet-another account. Publishers benefit because they don’t have to worry about running comment registrations themselves, plus they get to easily integrate other social networks directly into their blogs.

The new Disqus Comments improved automated tools for dealing with spam or abusive comments. There is a restricted word filter that will trigger moderator approval on comments and you can whitelist or blacklist a certain e-mail or username.

A new addition I really like is the new Narcissus theme (no need for a screenshot, we already switched to this theme, here, on Web Upd8, take a look below).

Disqus Comments can import IntenseDebate and JS-Kit comments and export comments back out too. Additionally, the Moveable Type and WordPress (WordPress) plugins have been updated and allow for full comment synching.

Registered users will have their comments number displayed next to their username - another addition I really like:

Now if I could only see the total number of comments for my blog...

Again, Disqus Profile isn’t another profile, but a management tool for commenters to better keep track of and control their comments, subscriptions and various profiles. You can search through the comments you have left on other sites and edit or delete them without having to go back to a specific site or blog entry. You can also easily add-in your various social profiles from Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and OpenID and choose to syndicate your comments to some or all of those services.

You can also merge your profiles together. This is great for those of us who often forget that we sign-up or login with something and then end up with multiple accounts for the same thing.

The best addition in my view is that now, after you post a comment, the page won't need to reload. This can easily be set for any blog. For Blogger Blogs it may seem tricky because it requests you enter a url to a blank.html page or to /does-not-exist/ hosted on your domain. But this can easily be done by entering http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/blank.html (or any other URL which redirects to a 404 page) in the corresponding form field (Disqus Dashboard > Settings > General at the bottom of the page). You can test this feature by commenting to this post ;)

And the last new addition I noticed: Disqus now supports FeedFlare for FeedBurner, meaning it can display the number of comments from your blog, right on your feed. To enable this, login to your Feedburner account, go to Optimize > FeedFlare, enable it and in the "Add new flare" field, enter http://YOUR_BLOG_DISQUS_NAME.disqus.com/~feedflare/comments_link.xml , obviously replacing YOUR_BLOG_DISQUS_NAME with your blog name on Disqus (Example: http://webupd8.disqus.com/~feedflare/comments_link.xml)

Please note there could be other changes / improvements too, but Disqus hasn't publish any info just yet.

[via mashable.com]

Disqus comment system (which we use here, at WebUpd8) just decided it's time to stop the spam, and until they make their own anti-spam system:

We’re seeing an increase in a couple different types of spam lately. Sometimes it’s your straightforward, anonymous spammers. We can catch that easily. Recently, Disqus users have been victims to blackhat spammers who spend some time to leave legitimate comments, only to sign off with a suspicious link hawking designer sunglasses. We’ve gone through a handful of different spam handlers. We’re not entirely happy with what we have going on right now.

And last week, our spam handling went down for a short while which created a large backlog of unprocessed spam comments. This didn’t help things at all.

But, there is a solution. We’ve been working on our own Disqus anti-spam that we will be launching soon. It’s too early to report on its total effectiveness, but tests are looking very good.

they integrated Akismet, the most used anti-spam blog plug-in.

To enable Akismet for your Disqus-powerd blog comments, go to Disqus dashboard > Settings > check the "Akismet" option, and also enter your Akismet API (you need a wordpress.com account to receive an API, don't worry, it's free).

The unfortunate thing about commenting on blogs is that it’s all too often basically a silo: your message lives in one place, requires a specific login for that site alone, and can be difficult to share out if you feel you’ve been particularly insightful.

Systems like Disqus (which we use on Web Upd8) have been developed to start addressing the silo problem, providing a unifying login for sites that employ it and a way to track and distribute the conversation more widely on the web.

Disqus, one of the best comment systems, added the one thing it was missing: subscribing to comments via email. That means that when you post a comment on a blog powered by Disqus (such as Web Upd8), you have the option to subscribe to that comment thread and you will receive an email whenever someone replies to that post.

The "Subscribe by email" option appears in 2 places: once, at the top of the comments thread and under your name and email form, when you comment.

We started using Disqus primarily for it's speed compared to it's alternatives, but in the mean time, it has truly become great, one of it's best features being the social media comments which we love here at Web Upd8.

Web Elements is Google's new one-stop shop for services that can be embedded into any web page without requiring coding skills. You can embed maps, search results, calendars, news, spreadsheets, presentations, YouTube channels, but all of these features were already available in similar formats.

Friend Connect added an interesting web element for global conversations. "A global conversation is a conversation that takes place on several web site simultaneously. You can tell that you are looking at a global conversation because it says "Global conversation - learn more" underneath the title of the conversation. When you post to a global conversation, such as "mandolins", the post not only shows up on the web site where you posted it, but it also shows up on any site that chooses to embed the conversation, now or in the future."


So you can create an ad-hoc chat room that can be embedded in any web page that will continue the conversation. Friend Connect comes with an authentication system that doesn't require creating a new account, an option to use existing profiles, threaded comments, basic spam filtering, comment translation and other useful features.

Here is a embedded conversation:

Social Media Comments are like trackbacks: they’re a great way to find who’s talking about a blog post, but you’ll still need to leave the blog in order to reply. If you Tweet about a post, or talk about it on a wide range of social services, from Digg and Twitter to FriendFeed and beyond, we’ll find those comments and add them to the comment section as “social media comments”. The feature was made possible thanks to two partners: Disqus and UberVU and has been available only for Mashable for the past month.