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One of our creative users, Turnip, has created a custom set of stars (actually they are turnips, rather than stars ) for rating UI. He even did custom processing stage animated gif…Really cool and he thinks it was easy (we are looking to make it even easier soon)…See below (check it out by clicking on the image) :

We love this kind of customizations and really want to make sure that we provide you the full flexibility to enable these things…If you have done anything interesting like this, let me know and I’ll highlight it here.

We just updated the Blogger plugin…following are the changes:

1. Just one hop for most pages : We were making two sequential calls to load up the data for Blogger plugins…This was causing the performance/time to load for SezWho to be kinda poor. We have fixed the issue by just sending all the data in one hop only. Take a look at the improved performance at the following blogs:

http://allied.blogspot.com/
http://melisasriwulandari.blogspot.com/
http://www.briansolis.com

2. New updated UI: We have updated the blogger UI. Below is how the integration looks now:

this puts the author profile link next to their name…if name is not present, it will revert to the earlier behavior.

What do you think? Let us know if you notice any issues.

Few months ago, we silently added a feature where a user’s activity stream can be “followed”. We simply added an RSS feed of the user’s activities as captured from all SezWho enabled social media properties. Things were calm until 2 weeks ago when Jitendra posted a HowTo on getting the SezWho activity stream into FriendFeed. We immediately got a few feature requests. We started working on some cool new things in the feed. For now, we quickly added one.

The most wanted feature was an ability to filter blog posts from the activity stream. Why? Apparently, after joining FriendFeed, the first thing people do is add their own blog in FriendFeed, hence everybody wanted the flexibility to filter their own blog posts from SezWho activity stream. Here’s how you do it:

1. The default feed url of the activity stream right now looks like this:

http://feeds.sezwho.com/activitystream/rss/Indus_Khaitan/91321

2. Add “/off=post” (without the quotes) to the feed url, which now becomes:

http://feeds.sezwho.com/activitystream/rss/Indus_Khaitan/91321/off=post

3. Yup, That’s it. Cool, eh.

We love your suggestions. Keep ‘em coming

We just release the WP release 2.1.1 some of the improvements:

- The performance for sites with a lot of comments should now be wicked fast (over 200% improvement)

- Red carpet now picks images from 5 services (not just SezWho).

Go ahead and pop it in to see for yourself … here

Below are the list of articles about our announcement:

Bub.blicio.us : SezWho Acquires Tejit

Center Networks : SezWho Acquires Tejit

ReadWriteWeb : SezWho Acquires Tejit for a Semantic Platform

Louis Gray : SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy

TechCrunch : SezWho Seeks Context With An Acquisition

WebWare : SezWho acquires Tejit to expand commenter reputations

Mashable : SezWho Acquires Semantic Startup Tejit

Allied : SezWho? My Blog Life in Comments 2001-2008

FriendFeed: Louis Gray - SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy

Did I miss something? Please leave in comments and I’ll update.

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan Joins SezWho to Head Company’s Development Efforts

LOS ALTOS, Calif. – May 28, 2008 — SezWho (www.sezwho.com), a universal profile service for the social web that engages communities and enables content discovery, today announced its acquisition of Tejit, a provider of semantic intelligence solutions. The integration of Tejit’s proprietary semantic intelligence-based discovery engine will bring richer, context-based profile and reputation management capabilities to the SezWho service. To be useful across different types of social media, profiles and reputation have to be localized and linked to the context of the conversation. In this way, thought leaders emerge within and across communities based on their specific expertise and contributions.

The acquisition enables SezWho to provide more precise contextual reputation scores for contributors based on topics of conversation. In this way, users can build their reputations in specific areas increasing their social capital. Unlike comment replacement systems, SezWho augments conversations rather than replacing blog comments. With SezWho, posts and comments can be ranked across blogs, forums, and other social media. Data and content reside within the community, while users can access their universal profiles across social media sites.

SezWho has begun integration of Tejit’s semantic-analysis engine, which uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic matching technology to identify topics, sentiments and entities present in web content. Building on the elements of Semantic web and advanced information retrieval techniques, like entity recognition and text classification, this new technology locates the relevant discussions and content around topics of interest. The use of algorithms to rank content differs from the traditional citation-driven approach, allowing for a deeper interpretation of content and more accurate reputation scoring.

“The integration of this innovative semantic analysis technology with our own universal profiles, content discovery and reputation services allows SezWho to more closely emulate how communities flourish on the long tail as we provide more precise context-based reputation scoring for those who contribute,” said SezWho CEO, Jitendra Gupta. “The traditional method of content discovery based on the similarity of content is not adequate for connecting conversation across social sites in a meaningful way. A new level of context-sensitive, semantic discovery is required to reflect all the layers of users’ participation across the social web, and to track their contributions in a way that is universally relevant both within and across communities.”

The SezWho service captures valuable information about the history and expertise of individual contributors, encourages more thoughtful commentary, and cultivates community engagement. Community participants use SezWho to rate one anothers’ posts and comments by indicating whether the content was useful or not. This rating is added to cumulative rankings, providing an overall score associated with individual profiles and allowing visitors to demonstrate their expertise and knowledge throughout all SezWho-enabled sites.

Tejit CEO Indus Khaitan will join SezWho to head SezWho’s development efforts. Khaitan began Tejit in 2007 as a personal project when he became frustrated reading duplicate content from the 1000+ blogs he had bookmarked. Tejit expanded its analysis capabilities across millions of blogs. Khaitan brings a decade of software development and product management experience to SezWho. In 2003, while at Symantec, Khaitan launched the company’s first internal blog and coined the term “Writable Intranet,” which has come to represent Enterprise 2.0. Khaitan was an early proponent of syndication using feeds and contributed to the RSS 1.0 specification in 2001.

Pics etc. to follow soon.

Update: Please join me in welcoming Indus to the team

If you are at Google I/O today say hi to him … he is out there roaming around

A number of users have asked us about how they can see their SezWho activity streams in FriendFeed. Below are the simple steps to make it happen.

1. Find your SezWho feed from your profile popup. (if you don’t have your profile popup, just leave a comment here and see your profile popup from hovering over the check me out link)

2. Get your feed URL

3. Import the feed into FriendFeed using Blog type feed

4. Enter the feed url from step 2

5. See the results.

Your activity feed is now in FriendFeed and users can follow you across the web.

Now all the benefits of SezWho service still remain - content stays in your site, no SEO implications etc.. So if a user click on any of these links, they will take you back to your own site rather than Sezwho. And of course you have a richer feed with your posts as well as activity across BBs etc.

Update: We now support filtering of the feed to show just comments or posts or both…Check it out at

http://www.sezwho.com/blog/2008/06/05/filtering-the-feed-activity-stream/

Last week we had the distinct pleasure of meeting with Marc Smith of Microsoft research…We talked about SezWho, Reputations and online communities. We discussed how social roles are assigned and developed in online communities. Marc has written a bunch on newsgroups/forums etc. and he has identified a number of fascinating roles that are easily discernible in most newsgroups/forums kind of communities. He mentioned 8 roles like drive-by, local experts, answer people, conversationalists, fans, discussion people, flame warriors, reply magnets and trolls. His research provides a way to identify these roles based on unique signatures of these roles in terms of interactions in the communities and he showed us the Chung project for visualizing and fine tuning the models.

I wonder how these roles map into blogs or social conversations like twitter and forums and wikis etc. happening right now across sites? Do these concepts still apply?

Regular readers of this site would recognize that we dig stuff like what Marc is working on as it helps us improve/fine tune the best reputation engine for the social web (so much for modesty ). In the past we have written about the 90-9-1 rule…It looks like this research fits pretty well with the 90-9-1 rule and even provides models to identify different kind of participants. I can’t wait to set up the models to run some analysis to identify how we can use them to improve community engagement.

We just switched our image server to a bigger machine…you should see a 3x performance boost in loading image…Let us know what you think?

Update: Looks like things are a tad better

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.