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.