What’s the potential of comments’ aggregation?
I invited Daniel Ha to meet me and answer this question. Daniel Ha is the Co-founder of Disqus, a distributed comment system for blogs and websites.
What Disqus does is, all the comments made on different blogs are saved up on one page. To get to know the specific features of Disqus.com, Alpha Mind Blog sizzled it pretty nicely. There’s two sticky facts about my discussion with Daniel Ha that are worth sharing.
The first one is the potential of tools like Disqus for online marketers working for brands. Disqus deals with the essence of the Web 2.0: comments, reactions, interactions.
Over time, such a database generates a lot of information, which can be imminently used to show reputation, ratings and statistics. Even better, with cool apps like a tracking tool, an online PR agency could monitor the whole commentosphere and react accordingly. The problem of “open-source brands” that Brian Solis explores along with other online PR professionals, has yet to find some concrete answers, and Disqus is in the right spot to address this problem.
What’s the second sticky fact? Legally, in terms of ownership, comments belong to blog owners where the comments are posted. So what happens if you want to make a book with all your comments gathered on Disqus? Technically, even though you are the creator of all of that content, nothing belongs to you, and you cannot exploit this content without the authorization of the blog owners where the comments were made. However, Daniel Ha is aware of this burlesque situation, and solutions are being explored to fix it.