I got a demo of SezWho.com, a system that enhances the commenting systems at blogs and other sites. If you plug it in to your blog, your readers can rate comments. The system tracks the reputation of commenters and uses that to weight their ratings of other commenters. (To rate a comment, you don’t have to join SezWho but you do have to supply an email address; they are going to enable you to rate anonymously, although since you won’t have a reputation, your rating won’t count for much.) You can click to see where else a commenter has commented.

Reputations are based on ratings, with influence gauged within communities of interest. Communities of interest are determined by the tags attached to the posts you’re rating.

Jitendra Gupta, who walked me through the product, points to the discovery element: If you find someone who comments well, you can click on her name and discover her blog and also easily see all of her comments on other sites.

The basic service is free. For a subscription, you get access to the details of the data about your site.

Privacy: You can manage your profile to some degree. If you unsubscribe, your history of comments and profile are hidden.

SezWho seems like an easy way to add functionality to your commenting system. It could be of great use for sites with so many comments that readers need some guidance, but I’m personally wary of adding a reputation system to smaller sites (like this one) where a comment rating system provides needless shaping of attention. It’s not like there are so many comments on EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com that you need a reputation system to figure out which ones to read. A reputation system provides a power to the crowd that, for smaller sites, we don’t need the crowd to have. For larger sites, it’s a different story.

Of course, that’s different from SezWho’s discovery function. Jitendra says that in the next release, there will be an option to “turn off the rating functionality and just have the context piece.” That provides a way to stitch together comments across sites, and, in general, stitching is a good thing because lack stitching is the number cause of wardrobe malfunctions.

[Tags: reputation_systems commenting reviews sezwho ]