SheGeeks

What was once a Mashable exclusive feature may now be available to every blog using the Disqus commenting system. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Social Media Reactions! (See Mashable’s post for an in-depth review: Mashable, Disqus, and UberVU Launch Social Media Comments.) Hat tip to Wayne Sutton for the tip off!

Social Media Reactions By Disqus

In short, social media reactions (formerly Social Media Comments) pulls mentions and comments about your content made on other web services into your Disqus commenting system. For example, if someone posts a comment about your latest post on FriendFeed, Disqus finds it and pulls it into the system as a “social media reaction.”

Head to your Disqus account under Admin & Settings. Scroll down and you’ll find an option to enable Social Media Reactions. Current services include FriendFeed, Vimeo, Twitter, Picasca, Digg, Flickr, Blogg, Typepad, Wordpress, Movable Type, Youtube, and an option for other services.

Comment Fragmentation Who?

I’m not sure if this will pull in comments and mentions made on previous posts. I highly doubt it in any case. I’m not sure how well this works right now, but I plan to test it out on SheGeeks for the rest of the week. So feel free to comment on Friendfeed or Twitter about the content on SheGeeks.net.

Popularity: 76% [?]

this is a guest post by (jeff)isageek who also has his own blog over at jeffisageek.net

Today Disqus, a community driven commenting service (say that 4 times fast), announced that it will be integrating video comments using video service Seesmic bringing another great feature to what is already an awesome service.

Why did Disqus decide to add video commenting?

Our main goal with Disqus has always been to enhance how people interact and participate on blogs. Video comments, while a relatively new concept, is something we’ve been hearing people chatter about recently. Enabling video conversation is not our focus, so we came together with our friends at Seesmic to make this happen.

So why does Disqus have video comments? We think it’s easy and fun — a different way to approach a blog discussion. Decide for yourself.

I think one aspect that is going to make using video comments a big hit with Disqus is one how easy it is to actually leave a comment - you press a red button, sign into your seesmic account, and then record. Secondly, check out how easily it integrates with your current non video comments and has a nice/simple/clean look. See below for an example of how it will look in your comment stream.

I think this is a great move by Disqus and Seesmic to integrate video comments into blogs everywhere. It’s another sign of how the social web continues to grow and produce “awesomesauce” results.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’ve been using the Disqus social commenting system for a well over a 2 month now. Since I’ve started using Disqus, I’ve written numerous articles with nothing but praises not only for the Disqus product, but also for the great support team behind Disqus. While Fred of A VC mentions 3 Great Reasons to Use Disqus, David Risely thinks it’s pointless and possibly stupid. That’s OK. I’ll give one story as to why installing Disqus was the smartest thing I could’ve done!

In his post, Risely noted some unmoving concerns for the Disqus commenting system:

So, could I bring the comments back into Wordpress if I chose? From this discussion, it seems the answer is no but they are working on it. And what happens if Disqus goes the way of the dodo? Did I just lose everything? Also, it seems as if you can’t moderate your own comments inside WP anymore. Apparently, they are working on a plug-in for that. So, not only are all my comments now on a remote server, but I have to separately log into a remote server to moderate them?

His first question seems to be the only true reasonable concern one should have. For his second concern, if Disqus went bye-bye, yes your comments would too. However, last month Disqus didn’t go bye-bye for me. Instead, my domain did.
    

Disqus To The Rescue

Unfortunately, this couldn’t have happened at a more horrible time. Not only was SheGeeks beginning to break ground in the blogosphere, but I had absolutely no backups of ANY of the files of SheGeeks. None, zip, nada! After my previous domain went down, I did a mad scramble to get what I could with the help of a lot of the friends and developers that I’d made a connection with.

Since I use Windows Live Writer to publish my posts, a copies of each post are saved on my hard disk. Yes, I went through the majority of them to salvage what I could. However, my comments were gone. Oh, wait! Disqus has them! AWESOMESAUCE!

I immediately emailed the Disqus support team and within an hour I had a reply letting me know that as long as my link structure was the same, there wouldn’t be any problems changing the domain url and getting the comments back on the new SheGeeks. It worked like a charm! The End.
 

Bonehead Preferences

As for Risely’s last concern, I actually like moderating comments via my Disqus dashboard. It’s a lot more efficient and organized than WordPress’ management options. However, this concern is more of a personal preference rather than a substantial reason to not use Disqus. Over 10,000 blogs couldn’t possibly be boneheads, including this one.

So if you haven’t made the switch to Disqus with no substantial reason as to why, why not give it a spin?

Popularity: 9% [?]