When you leave a comment on a comment, how often do you wonder what your rights are? Not too often, I’d guess. Over the years, it has become an accepted fact that content contributed to a website simply belongs to that website. If the website, or blog for today’s web, goes away then all of your contributions disappear along with it.

A real world analogy would be sending in letters or artwork to a magazine. There’s usually that disclaimer which says the publication can do whatever with your submission. And, of course, they can’t return anything to you. It belongs to the magazine now.

A different view

The landscape, however, is somewhat changing. It wasn’t too long ago that big media began to realize that they need to embrace their audiences. One dimensional publication became two dimensional and refocused around users, the people that consume and contribute. Leaving comments has become more than just simple responses. Many are very long and well thought out. They’ve essentially become blog posts left on others’ blogs.

Do comments need to solely belong to the blog on which it sits on? I’m not so sure it does. Comments are, in some way, the currency in which bloggers are paid for their posts. Bloggers want to encourage active discussions on their site. A way to encourage discussion is to give the participants more control of their contributions.

This blog post is largely inspired by Hank Williams’ blog post which asks, Who has comment copyright ownership? Hank makes the point that blog platforms and services such as Disqus should make this clear for both bloggers and the people who comment. I agree.

Rights and Control

So what are a commenter’s rights? I’m going to make an initial attempt to materialize what some rights should be.

a) The ability to edit and remove their comments
b) Access to all of their comments, even if it has been deleted on a blog
c) The right to use their own comments as blog posts. After all, a commenter is just a publisher not writing on his own website.
d) A life for the comment beyond a single blog. I want to take my comments with me, even if the blog shuts down.

This may seem threatening to the publisher, but it really isn’t. A commenter should have rights to what they post, but bloggers should still have control over content that appear on their blogs. Bloggers should still control:

a) Whether or not someone is allowed to comment on his blog
b) The deletion of a comment
c) The modification of a comment, as long as the original copy is still accessible and the edit is transparent

Ownership

All of this may result in some ambiguous notion of shared ownership between commenters and bloggers. This needs to be clarified somehow, preferably with the cooperation of all the companies and services doing things in this area.

Tool and Platform

I don’t want us to be hypocritical. We’ve heard the charges: our platform is proprietary and we store comments on our server. This is true. However, we’ve embraced openness from the start with our API and willingness to open up our platform to anyone to build on. We’ve spent some time thinking about where to go from here and we’ve come up with something that could be great. I won’t talk about it now, but I can say that it involves everyone playing nicely together, including our competitors.

Regarding ownership, I want to make it clear that Disqus does not want to own your comments, whether you are a blogger using Disqus or a reader commenting on this system.

We position ourselves as two things: a tool and a discussion platform. I call it a platform because people are using what we’ve built to create new tools for conversation. This excites us over here.

This platform is moving toward openness. I feel this will help us succeed as a company. Disqus began to solve problems of fragmentation and we don’t want to create further fragmentation by being closed. We will come out on top because our tools and products will be better, not because the platform is locked.

Moving forward

We have learned a lot in the recent months. The next major updates to Disqus will explicitly address a number of these issues right in the service itself, including a clarification of a commenter’s rights in our policy.

This is only a first draft to solicit some thoughts. Fred Wilson recognized it as a straw man proposal. He’s right. We want to generate discussion and ideas. What do you think? Whether you blog, comment, or both: what is important to you?

Once again, the community lends us a hand. This one comes from Laibcoms (thanks!).

We recommend only advance users and tinkerers attempt this one. If you’re having any problems with our Blogger integration tool, try this guide on manually editing the template.

Of course, we do plan on releasing an improved integration tool in a near-future release.

[UPDATE] Laibcoms also has another guide for integrating Disqus with Blogger classic templates.

Tumblr recently changed the permalink URLs on everyone’s blog.

For example, this permalink URL:
http://obscurelyfamous.com/post/35650013/

is now structured like this:
http://obscurelyfamous.com/post/35650013/i-always-get-this-same-sidebar-ad-im-a-little/

Since Disqus uses a page’s permalink URL as the comment thread identifier, this change breaks the association of a blog post with its comment thread.

We are working on getting this resolved. Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused and thank you for your patience.

[UPDATE] Jason @ Disqus: Hi, we’ve just rolled out a fix which fixes part of the problem. This will be completely fixed by the end of the day.

---

[UPDATE 2] As of 05/23/08 03:00 PST, all outstanding issues with missing comments on Tumblr have been resolved. Please send us an email at if you are still experiencing issues.

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.