There’s a new kid on the block on the comments side of the business, Intense Debate. The premise of the service is outstanding – provide a central repository to track your visitors’ comments, expand the commentary beyond your blog, and provide a very rich interface to display the comments.
There is a single flaw with the service, though, that makes it unusable… the comments are loaded via JavaScript, something that the Search Engines will not see. If you have a fantastic blog post with tons of traffic that changes every few minutes, the crawlers from Google and the likes won’t notice a single change. Comments, or ‘user-generated content’ are as important to your blog as your posts!
Not as important but still problematic is the promise from Intense Debate that you can export your comments if you decide to ever leave the service. That’s a tough pill to swallow… especially if they simply abandon their service and shut down the site.
Would I ever utilize Intense Debate? Perhaps… if they abandoned the JavaScript method of displaying the comments and, instead, changed their service to ‘shared’ approach where the comments are served by my blog BUT are also posted to their service. That would provide the best of both worlds… all the advantages of their application in addition to benefiting from the user-generated content of my site.
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