SezWho.com Homepage

Of late we have seen some confusion around what exactly is SezWho and what we are about…Let me try to address some of the common points:

What SezWho isn’t:

- Its not a comment replacement system

- It does not take over your content and does not introduce a single point of failure in your system

- It does not deal with comment spam. We believe that services like akismet/spam karma etc. do a great job of managing spam and we are not looking to reinvent the wheel.

- We do not provide a comment moderation system. We believe that native platforms like Wordpress, Drupal etc. have a good system with a very active community who are addresses this problem…Again not looking to reinvent the wheel

What SezWho is:

- We are a distributed context and reputation service for the social web - This means, we don’t manager your comments but we just provide context and reputation for the contributors on your site…End result- more contributions, more interactions and more engagement.

- SezWho provides context and reputation for the social web users, wherever they are producing content - this could take the form of a post (example at the bottom of this post), a comment, a discussion forum post (example here), a wiki entry and on and on and on….

- SezWho does not effect the SEO of a site as the content stays with your sites

- No issues with your content getting indexed twice as the content stays within your site only…SezWho just has the links to your content

- SezWho improves the community engagement. This means more comments, more ratings and better conversations

- SezWho enables discovery of interesting content based on profiles of your user

- SezWho is connecting over a million content items and has over 7K sites using the service at this point…We display over 200K profiles a month on different sites.

Check out the platforms that have been requested over the last couple of months…These requests also give you a sense of the richness and variety of the blogosphere…Of course as you pointed out, support for Blogger (#1 request) is already available with many more coming soon.

I recently read infomercials posted by Fred Wilson (here) and Howard Lindzon (here) on one of their portfolio companies - Disqus.

I just don’t get it.

Don’t get me wrong, Disqus provides some nice user interface features currently not provided by some of the conventional blog comment platforms. Perhaps more importantly, Disqus has helped underscore the increasing relevance of user generated content in social media. But why would a site owner want to surrender their data in return for threaded discussions and some other features? There are the technical downsides to comment replacement such as SEO implications and the lack of support of trackbacks and other features - Allen Stern (here) and Douglas Laskarr (here) do a great job of discussing these and here.

But more generally there’s the risk associated with turning over your data to a third party -– data portability, ownership, privacy, mining. What if their servers go down or they go out of business?Is it really worth it?

At SezWho we believe that it is possible to provide these capabilities without replacing comment systems, but by augmenting them with additional functionality. Rating/reputation, threads, filtering, and shared profiles can all be supported. However, it doesn’t end with just blog comments. In addition to comments our shared profiles aggregate blog posts, forum contributions and soon wikis, pictures and video. Blog comments are really just the start. As social media continues to grow the ability to connect and evaluate all forms of user generated content will become essential. Looking forward to your comments (btw, they’ll be safe and sound here on our site, right where you left them :-)).

Now that we are growing, some of your asked for our privacy policy and our TOS…Finally after spending weeks and weeks on it, we have updated them. Check them out at

http://sezwho.com/policy.php

http://sezwho.com/tos.php

Given that it takes a long time/money to get these things together, feel free to copy or reuse any part of it.

Thanks Alex…I love it…Great guide…

Check it out here.

It has a lot of minor fixes and performance improvements. Also a few more configuration options.

Check it out and upgrade

http://sezwho.com/install_wp.php

The BlogCatalog version is also out at

http://sezwho.com/install_bc_wp.php

We are announcing the support for rating of posts for Blogger blogs…If you are already using SezWho on Blogger you need not do anything  (it will just show up next time you load your page).

Of course you can modify the look and feel etc. from your edit presentation page.  As usual the data for the posts and comments stays within your existing platforms so you have no SEO issues etc.

Check it out at

http://sezwho.com/demo.php

I think it is rocking with Bob doing his impression of James Earl Jones…What do you think?

Hey Guys, we ran into some problems over the last couple of days related to our registration page. It turned out we had enabled SSL on our registration page for security but when we passed the form params from an SSL page to an non-SSL page, the registration data was getting lost (Kuldeep along with all the rest of the team - for not catching it - is going to be in the doghouse for a week for this one ). This problem only effected people who were registering their blog along with their email. Needless to say that it is all fixed now.

So what does that mean…It means that about 65 of you guys who signed up over the last couple of days, did not get your blog keys or were running into key-activation issues. We are working through the logs to make sure that we send out new keys to all of effected users along with an apology…If you haven’t heard back from us or are still having problems, please feel free to drop me a line at jitendra {at} sezwho {dot} com or to support {at} sezwho {dot} com and we will take care of it with extreme alacrity.

We are thrilled to announce the availability of SezWho 2.0. Most of it is based on your feedback…Its a big release with a lot of features:

Enhanced User Interface Flexibility

• You asked for it, so here we are: Enhanced design along with full CSS flexibility. Check out the”Edit Presentation” link against your blog in the myAccount page. This link launches you into a ui config nirvana with a number of pre-packed design options. See the screen shots below:

• Support for template modifications to get the exact markup that works. With this approach users can layout their pages exactly as they like.
• Cross platform avatars (users don’t need to reload the avatars again and again)…SezWho reuses users’ existing avatars like from Gravatar.

Expanded Platform Reach and Enhanced Openness

• Rating and context of posts (in addition to comments): This means that users can build a reputation profile based on posts as well as comments. Look at the end of this post for an example:

• Expanded blogging platform support: Drupal, Blogger (Beta), Wordpress 2.5: Check it out in action over at a number of sites like:

Blogger: My @Ventures

More coming soon.

• Expanded support for phpBB to engage communities in other social interactions online.Check it out at SezWho Support
• SezWho Developer Toolkit, with APIs, tools, and guidance in expanding SezWho to virtually any social media site. Its called SZPDK.
• Open activity stream via RSS for readers. This is cool because now you can follow your favorite commenter via RSS or aggregator like FriendsFeed or SocialThing.

• Open user authentications via OpenID. We now support OpenID based comments and registration and login using OpenID … (We just took the registration and login part down because of some issues…should be back up soon).

Enhanced Reputation and Ratings

• Support for anonymous ratings.

• Support for authenticated ratings.
• Support for participation-based credits. This means that posting and comments earn you reputation credits in SezWho algorithm.
• Improved analysis of context-based reputations.

Phew!!! That was a lot…Let us know what you think?