This post is in response to Tim Trent, who posed a question in a comment thread.
Tim said that he felt the JS-Kit ECHO comment app does not enhance the user experience and asked why I then decided to install it.
There are several points which I need to raise in explaining an adequate answer. Firstly, installing it was not entirely necessary and the reception he (and separately Elizabeth Thomas) gave it does show it isn't universally welcomed.
However I started investigating comment apps for my Reading List newsblog as it began kicking off various discussions. These discussions took advantage of Blogger's anonymous function to make partisan attacks, but at the same time I did not want to concede defeat and impose restrictions to limit and control the conversation.
Instead I felt a more sophisticated bolt-on would be more attractive to my needs.
Blogger's main advantage as a publishing platform is that it is highly intuitive, and as the main free blogging platform it dominates the sector thereby setting the basic standard for online behaviour.
But I wanted to raise the standard on my main site to discourage petty partisan sniping, which I feel is not in the wider interests of constructive debate. Although I will accept accept anonymous comments I know the basic rule of thumb is that people are lazy and all I had to do was find a prompt which would eliminate all but the most persistent trolls and tarquins.
The main alternatives I considered installing were JS-Kit ECHO, IntenseDebate and DISQUS.
As you can see from their frontpages the difference in approach is immediately apparent: DISQUS requires a complex registration and installation procedure and IntenseDebate has numerous registration and notification verification pages. By comparison once I decided it was for me I got JS-Kit up and running on my blog in slightly less than two-and-a-half minutes.
JS-Kit offers additional functionality by providing automatic links to URLs, as well as cross-platform communication - so if you sign in with a Twitter account then your comment will also be published there.
This offers the potential to connect disparate discussions in multiple locations happening simultaneously. It's something that I've only experimented with, partly because it requires greater discipline in restraining the length of comments, but also because it is only likely to start having a significant effect as more sites install JS-Kit (interestingly Technorati has favoured it).
So far the most interesting function has been the automatic comment history. This demonstrates the benefits of identity when viewing the details of each individual commenter.
And this leads into the second big advantage of JS-Kit: the massive simplification of comment moderation. Although I tend to be opposed to any restriction on discussion I have moderated an occasional piece of spam which obviously has nothing to do with anything and I've found the comment history has enabled me to distinguish more easily between suspected and real spam.
I accept there is an issue with its' clunkiness and JS-Kit may not offer sufficient benefits to make it worthwhile for every blogger, but it does suit my purposes and I am pretty well satisfied with the results.
Now all I hope is that growing familiarity will breed trust and my visitors will find themselves more able to comment in a constructive manner.
