MicroBlogging is being spoken of all over the blogosphere. Is it good? Will I produce traffic? Can I make money off it?
The answer is NO, in my opinion. The reason for this is microblogging is small sentences or groups of words that create a small issue. Comments for example are forms of micro blogging.
What is Micro Bloggin exactly?
It is a form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates about your life or situation while on the go and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. The most popular service is called Twitter.
After the launch of Twitter a lot of small service wanted to take in this popularity and produce other microblogging sites. Once that I joined is ofcourse Twitter and the other is Pownce.
These sites just lets you post small information on what is happening currently or what is on your mind at the moment and just upload it to a website.
Since I stated comments are a form of microblogging. There is a website that helps with this called IntenseDebate. TechCrunch says Intense Debate is:
Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting system that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. You can test out the system on the TechStars blog, but you’ll have to apply to the private beta if you want to install it on your own.
Since it will replace your WordPress comment system you will not be using your databse to store these comments you will be using Intense Debate's servers for the storage of comments. Will this be useful for bloggers?
I do see some positive and that is exposure of other blogs. Once you sign up you are given a profile, which will track all your comments you left on blogs that HAVE the intense debate plugin installed. It tracks how many comments you have posted and even show what blogs.
It shows threaded comments by the commenter who has left any comments on any blog (<- did that make sense?), you can even subscribe to their RSS. Here is a view of a user public profile. To the left you can see all the blogs the user has commented on and to what blog too!
This is the only reason I can see that it can be helpful to a blogger.
The negatives, I think is that commenting should be what the reader is thinking about your post. Though Intense Debate is about commenting on real post, they are being scored. Why would you want to score your comment? The more you comment the higher rep you get within their community, but for what? During the tour this is what is said:
Rate the comments you read and determine which comments rise to the top and which fall to the bottom.
Gain authority through a reputation system based on the number of comments you've made and the quality of those comments as determined by the other users.
I think this is good for networking to an extent but gaining authority within the community because you post more comments than the commenter next to you? I don't know.
For me I will not be joining because I think comments should be comments and not be provided points. Though this is a good way to use Web 2.0, I think commenting on blogs should be left to the reader and that alone. I might be wrong on this since I have decided not to join, but let us see what other bloggers say about this.
Today is the final release of intense debate since it has finished beta testing. You can see the plugin in action within their blog post.
What do you think of this new system? Will this change how commenting is done? Will comments be considered blogging?
