I (Daniel) had the opportunity to chat with Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on their net@night podcast, or netcast, on Tuesday.

Check it out here.

I’m a big fan of a lot of Leo’s stuff so this was really fun. We talked about what Disqus is and a little about our work to reshape how people perceive blog discussions. There’s also a little bit about how important the trust of bloggers is to us. I come in around the halfway point, but I highly recommend listening to the entire podcast.

Leo is a Disqus user as well so be sure to pop over to his blog and say ’sup.

Hi everyone,

This is a quick Friday post to acknowledge certain concerns and questions about using a service like Disqus to handle a vital component of your blog. We want everyone to know that we understand how important comments and discussion is to a website. In fact, this is exactly why Disqus exists.

I intend to go into more detail soon. We’re happy to be working on something that makes bloggers excitedly eager to buzz about, and we fully intend to earn your trust every step of the way.

Have a good weekend,

Daniel @ Disqus

We just launched something that I think is pretty cool: video comments. Disqus partnered with Seesmic for this one. Seesmic is a new service that powers video-enabled conversations. We’re big fans over here at Disqus and we’re happy to be working with them.

Why?

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.

Get to it

If you have Disqus enabled on your blog, you can choose to enable or disable video comments right here: disqus.com/configure

Give it a try below or test it out on any of the following sites:

Scripting.com
LouisGray.com
SheGeeks.net
avc.blogs.com
HowardLindzon.com
LoicLemeur.com
WinExtra.com

(UPDATE: Pardon the lame and erroneous title. I mean: Now with 1+100% more video. Thanks Niclas!)

Loic and I (Daniel) chatting on the streets of San Francisco.

Disqus has a integration method for most of the popular platforms out there. For those we don’t explicitly support, we have a general implementation. Sean Reiser used this to create a Howto on integrating Disqus with the Drupal platform. Many Drupal users will definitely find this helpful — thanks Sean!

As an unrelated side-one, one of my favorite technology blogs, VentureBeat is now using Disqus to power their blog discussions. Cool? Yeah, I think so. Let them know what you think.

To bring up someone’s mini profile, you can hover your mouse cursor over his/her picture or name. The mini profiles were relatively incomplete when we released it, only serving to show other profiles and services that a commenter used or had on the web.

Our latest update adds a couple things that, together, should increase the mini profile’s usefulness factor by at least 68% (rough estimate). Bring up someone’s mini profile to view the last few things they’ve said across blogs using Disqus. If he added Twitter to his Disqus profile, you can view his current status as well.

I just wanted to quickly point out that we added support for gravatars earlier this week. Gravatars are popular universal avatars. If you haven’t uploaded a picture on Disqus, we’ll display your gravatar (if you have one) instead.

“…but not when you’re having it.”

We were offered this advice by many different people when discussing the scaling issues we may run into when creating such a distributed web application.

The idea is that it would be a good problem because it would surely indicate that we were popular, thriving, and thus successful. But it isn’t a good problem for all of you that are users of Disqus. It isn’t a good problem for us at Disqus, as we’re building our service based on trust, performance, and reliability.

We had some downtime this morning, starting at 7am PST, for a little under 30 minutes.
We are sorry. I am personally sorry. Being a popular service is not a valid excuse for being unavailable when other websites depend on you.

So, what are we doing about it? Lots. We have spent a lot of time recently optimizing and tweaking. Disqus is in transition-mode to upgrading our web and database servers (plus a few other misc. infrastructure points).

Bonus apology: This week, email us with the subject “Downtime makes me sad” and we’ll send over some cool Disqus swag. Be sure to indicate your blog/website and share a sentence or two about your experiences with Disqus.

Thanks all — it’s not a good problem to have and we’ll do our best to make sure it doesn’t become a problem you have to deal with.

We’re very excited to announce our integration with Plaxo, a step in the right direction regarding the defragmentation of comments and web discussion. But, first, some background:

A little over a week ago, there was some chatter about how conversations were getting split across the original blog article and feed/aggregator type services.

Some felt that bloggers should take issue with the fact that their article’s discussion is happening somewhere else. This is a valid concern. If I took the time and energy to write a carefully crafted post, I’d like the discussion to be accessible on the blog. However, the discussion that happens on sites like reddit or digg is important. It exposes the article or content to a wider audience that might not otherwise participate in the comments. The problem, then, is that the comments are now fragmented.

One of our goals here at Disqus is to defragment discussions. Because Disqus is a intermediary service that works with bloggers and commenters, we can act as a bridge.

Plaxo Pulse is a very cool service that allows you to stay connected with your friends’ activities on the web, including blog posts. If your blog uses Disqus (why wouldn’t it?), you can now sync that up with Plaxo. Then, whenever someone makes a comment on Plaxo in response to your blog post, it’ll get posted right back to your blog through Disqus.

Check out Plaxo’s blog post about this new integration.

This is partly made possible through our API write method which, while not public in the docs yet, is just about ready for mass consumption. If your service is interested in connecting conversations, let us know at all@disqus.com.

UPDATE: John McCrea has a great blog post up about this, appropriately titled Who Owns This Conversation, Part Two. It’s the continuation of an ongoing discussion, but it’s now heading in the right direction.

There were a couple small things added for blog admins (moderators) this week.

• Under the Access & Moderators tab, you are now able to set words that you don’t want posted on your blog. Comments containing any of those words will be put in moderation for your approval (or, more likely, disapproval).
• Take a look under the Configure tab. There’s a new option that enables you to set the max thread depth for replies. If you have a narrow page design, a busy conversation with multiple replies may not work too well. You can force the replies to stop threading after 1, 2, or any number of posts.

Have a great weekend, folks! See you at Startup School if you’ll be there.

ReadBurner relaunched today with a number of cool new things including integration with Google Reader and Disqus.

You can catch the details on SheGeeks and ReadWriteWeb.

At Disqus, we’re working to smooth out the Disqus integration so that conversations are not fragmented between websites and services. Soon comment threads on ReadBurner will tie in with the comment threads on the blog itself.

Another great RSS aggregator is RSSmeme which also uses Disqus for its comment system. Check out both and let them know what you think.