Harnessing the Power of your Blog Comments

Comments makes you blog better! For me they are always a source of inspiration. I am doing a review series of a couple of WordPress relevant services/plugins which caught my eye recently.

CommentPower

This service is still in closed beta and will be launching soon. I had a chance to try it out early and you can see it for real, in my comments section.

With CommentPower everyone has an opportunity to evaluate any comment. The Comment author is rewarded with points for any valuable comment they make on blogs which are CommentPower enabled. All the rewards and comment links of a any comment-author is centrally managed in the CommentPower Servers.

The AJAXified interface of CommentPower is really usable. Implementing the Plugin on your WordPress blog does require you to be fairly knowledgeable in PHP.

These are features supported by CommentPower:-

• Cross-connects blogs and other social mediums based on common participants
• Identifies and highlights the best user generated content making it easy to find quality content
• Enables readers to browse user generated content based on the users
• Enables site owners to drive traffic by leveraging their community
• Provide context on the contributors in your community(see image below)
• Lowers the bar for participation by empowering readers to contribute by voting
• Incentivizes positive contribution by rewarding contributors with “portable credibility”

The comment-highlighting functions are highly recommended as it helps while wading through tons of comments on regularly read popular blogs.

The traffic generation of CommentsPower is exciting but I would rather like to see the CommentsPower implemented as a FireFox Plugin if it has to realize soon.

This is definitely an innovative idea worth trying!.