First, we provide a hosted solution. the blog’s comments will go on our servers, that is true. This is no different than folks using blogger to blog and gmail for their email. We don’t hide this. For those hung up on this issue, we provide an importer/exporter so that they can have all the data from their comments at any time. We do feel it is useful to the publisher because 1)with javascript, the publisher isnt forced to download new versions as they come out. we fix bugs immediately. also, we are able to offer some really great features because of this.

Points are nothing new when it comes to comments. Digg has used them for quite a while. We use the points to help in the calculation of a reputation and to help with fighting spam or pointless posts. We can use it for filtering purposes that havent been released.

Our whole goal is to make the commenting experience better so that communication is spurred and blogs truly become conversation tools.

To address your first two points, I am not sure people who use services like twitter and others are out to make money with their little blurbs. In my opinion they do it to market themselves or their services. As far as publishers who use our service, we will introduce revenue generating solutions for them later.

Ian, our data suggests that our service does bring traffic to blogs and people generally stay on the blogs longer. So, really good things. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns you can email me directly at josh at intensedebate dot com

but if that is so that would ruin the concept of blogging and communication, it is similar to buyblogcomments if you are stating that because people will just comment just because they are going to get paid – will they read the post, will they contribute something useful? etc pay to comment does not sound to good to my ears