VentureBeat

We’re live at the TechStars demo day in Mountain View, Calif., where companies from the incubator are showing off what they’re up to. Just announced: Intense Debate, a blog commenting plugin system that grew out of Tech Stars, has been bought by Automattic, parent company of blog platform WordPress, for an undisclosed sum.

The Intense Debate system includes commenter profiles, threaded comments, spam control, and other features designed to make the comment sections of online articles more interactive. Rivals include Disqus (which we use) and JS-Kit.

“We started thinking whether we should build it ourselves or buy one of the startups,” says Automattic chief executive Toni Schneider. The two companies were a good match in terms of team style and technology (PHP, MySQL, etc.), he adds. Intense Debate will stay an independent brand, though, and, as before, it will work with both WordPress’s software and other blog platforms.

Intense Debate isn’t disclosing traffic numbers, except to say that it’s been growing 25 percent per month and gets tens of millions of page views. Around 30 percent of blogs using Intense Debate also use WordPress, the company says. It also notes that the forthcoming version of WordPress, version 2.7, will include some commenting features based on Intense Debate, such as threaded comments, and that a new WordPress plugin for Intense Debate is also in the works.

Intense Debate has raised $300,000 from angel investors. The company says it will temporarily be going back into private beta while it works on integration with WordPress.

Disqus and Intense Debate are two new blog commenting systems going into public beta today. There are many such services, and none of them have really taken off.

However, these latest companies could help connect conversations in new ways, including by aggregating blog comments on popular social networks that are opening to developers.

Some sites, like coComment, offer features such as forums that are focused around generating a conversation on its own site. Meanwhile, sites like SezWho (we have it in place, below) provide cross-blog commenter profiles.

Both of these new companies take a two-pronged approach. They are both plugins for blog platforms like Blogger or TypePad, and both want to improve the flow of conversation within a blog post’s comment section with comment rankings and threads, and other features, like SezWho. They also both let commenters track their conversations across multiple blogs, like CoComment.

Disqus also offers an API so third parties can access blog comments and include them with other sites. With many social networks already looking to let third parties access their data, perhaps this API could lead to the duplication of comments on blogs and comments on news aggregators like Digg, or on social networks. Users of sites like Myspace or Facebook will discuss blog posts at length, without any of those conversations going back to the blog. For example, on a Facebook post that features a blog post, commenters on that posts aren’t revealed within the original blog’s comments.

So far, we haven’t seen or experienced a clear case of any commenting system producing more traffic for blogs, or more comments. But maybe they could.

After all, bloggers need to recognize a potential return if they are to go through the effort of installing the plugin.

These services also have some other differences. For example, Intense Debate lets you log in via OpenID. Disqus has a central forum so you can see what’s popular on the site. Disqus also comes with a hosted, white-label forum that blogs can introduce, if they want.

Both let you receive updates to threads you’ve commented on via email or RSS, and reply by email to comment again on the past. Disqus shows you the most popular or recent comments from across the blogs you read. CoComment, meanwhile, doesn’t have as advanced of a plugin.