Adding Community To The Comments

Bio_fred_2
Some of you might have noticed icons/faces next to some of the comments on this blog yesterday.

That’s because the people at MyBlogLog turned on "comment/profile integration" on my blog yesterday morning. The coolest thing about this is that I didn’t have to do a thing. They just flipped a switch somewhere and my comments are now integrated with my community.

If you have the MyBlogLog community on your blog, social network, and/or web site or service, then you can get comment/profile integration too. It’s working in TypePad as of yesterday and it will be working in WordPress and Moveable Type sometime this week. All you have to do to join the private beta is send an email to Eric (eric at mybloglog.com).

I am really excited about this for a bunch of reasons. First and foremost, I recognize the names of frequent commenters, but now I’ll have a face or avatar or icon to add to the mix. That makes my life a lot easier and hopefully makes it better for the people who read and contribute comments to my blog. Blogger comments have worked this way for a long time and now we have a cross platform solution that will support all the major content management solutions over time.

If you think someone has written a particularly interesting comment (or a particularly annoying one), you can click on their icon and be taken to their MyBlogLog profile. You can see where they blog, what other MyBlogLog communities they belong to, etc.

But mostly I am excited about the possibilities of where this can go. Ever since I put MyBlogLog community on my blog, I’ve been thinking about the possibilities that result from combining community and social media/blogging. To date MyBlogLog has mostly been about promise because there hasn’t been much to do inside the community. Now with comment integration, we are seeing the first move. I suspect they’ve got a bunch more up their sleeves.

So now when you are reading the comments and you see a little box that says "Add Photo" next you your name, click on that box and join my community. I’ll appreciate it and I suspect the rest of my readers will too.

#Bling#VC & Technology