VentureBeat

Cisco does a little better than expected — Sales fell 9 percent in October, compared to a year earlier, the computer networking giant reported yesterday; the company expects sales to drop up to 10 percent this quarter versus the $9.8 billion a year ago. Yet “[i]n our opinion, the U.S. will be the first major country to recover,” chief executive John Chambers said. More at the New York Times.

Hitwise: Yahoo wins presidential election web site traffic — Check out the table, below.

New York City funds study on how to preserve NY media industry — It looks to me like one idea has already been implemented: Have New York-based media outlets give preferential coverage to New York-based digital media companies.

Satellite radio company Sirius XM tries to refinance debt — Meanwhile, Sirius star Howard Stern throws some stones through his glass house as he tries to make fun of web companies like Twitter and Facebook.

MySpace’s new self-serve ads may be making up to $50 million a month — That’s what TechCrunch is hearing.

Micro-market for comment plugins getting consolidated — Blog platform WordPress recently bought Intense Debate; now, comment-and-poll blog plugin JS-Kit has bought rival CoComment [Update: Alarm:clock reported this as a purchase. TechCrunch has more recently talked to the companies and they've clarified that its just a partnership].

Chip-maker AMD cuts 500 more jobs — More on CNET.

Range Fuels hires Shell vice president as chief executive — David C. Aldous comes on board as the company builds a big new cellulosic ethanol plant. Oil company executives are slowly leaking over to biofuels.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer can’t believe Google is pouring money into a project without a clear revenue stream — That project is mobile-focused operating system Android. (Ballmer photo via, unsurpisingly, Android Community.)

Google employees sued in Italy for YouTube video — The charges come even though the video in question — of, regrettably, a handicapped child being bullied — was quickly pulled. Incidentally, Italy’s prime minister, media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, is well-known for his media manipulation. This video seems like a great excuse for his government to try to clamp down on a site that is more open to free speech.

 Updated

Ever notice how some blogs are filled with mean-spirited, crude or self-serving comments, while others have few comments at all?

Palo Alto’s SezWho, a service that lets you build a reputation based on the quality of your online comments, thinks it can change that. It launched a test version publicly last week.

The company offers a widget that plugs into a blog’s comment board and adds the question “Was this comment useful to you?” after every reader’s post Each commenter has a rating of 1-5, represented with small boxes next to his or her name.

Jakob Nielson, a respected pundit on web behavior, has written that when it comes to posting on blogs, 0.1 percent of the readers contribute the vast bulk of comments. The idea is to offer readers a chance to get recognized for their insights, giving them a new incentive to post. However, it could chase away those commenters whose rankings sink. Readers have the option to filter out the comments from posters with low ratings.

To leave a comment, you enter your e-mail address, and from then on SezWho starts building your reputation and creating a profile. You also have to give your e-mail address to rate a comment because SezWho gives more weight to your rating if you have a strong reputation, and less if you don’t.

Your profile, which others can access by clicking on a link to the right of your name, contains links to all the posts you’ve commented on in the past. This, says SezWho’s chief, Jitendra Gupta, is key to the service’s value for bloggers: It will leverage the contributions of their most prolific commenters, drive traffic to their older posts, and increase page-views overall.

If you want, you can add a picture to your profile, some brief information, and a link to your own blog.

One neat aspect is that your profile is portable, meaning your reputation goes with you to other blogs that have the widget installed. However, these reputations are context sensitive, so if you’re reputable on a tech blog, for example, your reputation won’t necessarily be strong on a blog about sports.

SezWho expects to make money from subscription fees — paid by bloggers who use the widget on their sites. The prices of the subscription, which range from free to $200 per month, depend on how many times commenters’ profiles get viewed. For its paid plans, SezWho guarantees it will increase pageviews by five to eight percent (depending on your subscription) or give you your money back.

SezWho also plans to use the reputation system it builds to identify influential contributors surrounding any given topic and offer marketers the ability to reach out to them. This will be opt-in only, however, so if the commenter doesn’t want marketers to have access them, they won’t.

There could also be some targeted advertising involved.

SezWho faces some competition from reader-centric blog widget, MyBlogLog and tools like Co.mments and coComment, which help you keep track of your commenting around the web, but SezWho is different and well-executed enough to possibly make a mark. Right now, it only works on Wordpress, but we’re Wordpress users and are thinking about giving it a try.

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CoComment launched last year, giving bloggers a way to track comments about topics across Web sites — without actually having to visit each site.

The company reports growth, saying users find it useful to follow conversations from a single place: Their profile page at CoComment (see here for example).

However, it is difficult to gauge how sustainable the growth will be. More on that later.

Today, it’s launching new features. Publishers can offer CoComment on their sites, so that users don’t have to download software to see their comments. They just go the publisher’s site on CoComment to track all their conversations in one place. This saves them time from having to click back and forth on multiple pages. It’s available for Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal and other platforms — through a blog-platform plugin.

So far, like CoComment , competitors Co.mments and Commentful had offered bookmarklets for users to track their comments. Commentful has a Firefox extension, as does CoComment.

CEO Matt Colebourne told us that 15 percent of the comments tracked are now taking place by conversations taking place directly on CoComment’s site. So it has become a forum of forums. To augment this, users can now become friends, track and add to each other’s comments, and see who else is commenting on their conversations — all from within CoComment itself. Hosted comments are also now visible and searchable there.

While this all may appear of marginally of interest to some, the site’s growth suggests others yearn for ways to track their conversations. It has grown from less than 30,000 users last October to around 325,000 users now, the company says, with growth still accelerating — in part because of friends inviting others to share views. However, it is difficult to know how many are active users (returning), and how many of these users are one-timers lured by the viral invites.

Another side-effect: If a blog gets commented on in the site, a link will allow users to go to the site to read the article, thereby driving more traffic to the publisher.

The site may help avoid censorship. CoComment is a “service provider” and not a content publisher. Governments — especially in Europe and Asia — that try to hold publishers accountable for reader comments will have a more difficult time going after CoComment, the company hopes. It hasn’t tested this yet, though. The company emphasizes privacy. It tracks locations, but it does not otherwise require personal information.

Here are the top 5 countries/regions, as a percent of its total users:

US: 25%
UK: 10%
Germany and France: 8%
Japan: 4%
China: 3%

Colebourne said he’s expecting trouble from the Chinese government, but hasn’t had any so far. The site can track comments in any language, although its user interface only supports six languages.

The company says it is talking with a number of large publishers in the UK who are interested in the protection it gives them (as opposed to having an in-house team that manually approves comments).

Incidentally, CoComment is based in Geneva and funded by Swisscom, a regional large telco there — CoComment wants to be the Switzerland of the comment-sphere, one might say. It is also funded by Netage Capital Partners, also the backer of Mixi, a popular Japanese social network.