VentureBeat

JS-Kit, best known for its easy-to-add commenting widget, has acquired Haloscan, another comment service, for an undisclosed mix of cash and stock. The acquisition adds 500,000 blogs to JS-Kit’s reach and makes it larger than the rest of the market, which includes Disqus, SezWho, and Intense Debate, combined.

The company made the acquisition in January and will now begin marketing the rest of its widgets, which include a ratings widget similar to the one below this post, to Haloscan’s existing base. It claims that its widgets, which are used by Sun Microsystems and JetBlue, now have over 19 million users and over 100 million page views a month. It’s not clear, however, how many of these users are active commenters. JS-Kit makes money by placing ads into a stream of comments and shares the revenue 50/50 with the content producer.

In conjunction with this news, JS-Kit has added a “portable profile” feature that strongly resembles the one offered by Disqus. This profile contains all of the posts a commenter has made across any of the sites in JS-Kit’s ecosystem. Despite the fact that this feature is clearly inspired by Disqus (which VentureBeat uses), JS-Kit CEO, Khris Loux, does not hesitate to bash his much-buzzed-about competitor, which he alleges “steals traffic from bloggers” and “is not upfront about its plans to monetize at the expense of its users.”

His critiques focus on the fact that Disqus hosts comments on its own servers and site and in so doing, takes away all the benefits that comments could have on a blog’s search engine ranking. Asked to respond to these criticisms, Disqus founder, Daniel Ha (no relation to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha), points out that his service offers a plug-in that makes it relatively simple to get search engines to index the comments on your blog, itself. Ha also argues that since JS-Kit puts ads in its users’ comments, its monetization plan interferes with the user experience.

See Allen Stern’s post on CenterNetworks for more on the ups and downs of Disqus.

Dell loses false advertising lawsuit: The New York Attorney General won a lawsuit against Dell and its financial services subsidiary for false advertising, fraud, deceptive business practices and abusive debt collection. The suit, brought by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in May 2007, said that Dell pulled a bait and switch on customers by failing to provide timely onsite repair to customers who paid for it.

Amazon.com cuts Kindle price 10 percent: Amazon cut $40 off the price of its Kindle electronic book reader. The company will now sell the device for $359. The device debuted in November but it is unclear how many of the devices for reading books, blogs, magazines have sold.

ABI Research predicts one billion users will view online video in 2013: ABI Research says that increasing broadband penetration and rising connection speeds will prompt more and more people to become consumers of online video. By 2013, the market researcher predicts that a billion people will be watching web video. Mostly, that means they will be watching free video on the web. For pay-TV providers, they better get with the program or find themselves serving a smaller and smaller slice of the viewer audience, ABI says.

Vodaphone gets a new CEO: Vodaphone Group said that Vittorio Colao will become the CEO of the company. He succeeds Arun Sarin, who has been CEO for the past five years. During that time, Vodaphone expanded into Eastern Europe and grew its customers from 120 million to 260 million globally.

SezWho buys Semantic intelligence company: SezWho, which lets readers rate commenters on blogs and other sites, said it is buying semantic firm Tejit to improve context-based reputations for the social web. SezWho creates universal profiles and now it hopes to integrate Tejit’s proprietary semantic intelligence-based discovery engine to improve overall service.

Closing the barn door a little late? Belgian newspapers are suing Google for $77.5 million for posting their copyrighted material without permission on Google News. This sounds a little like approaching Genghis Khan for war reparations.

Akimbo insider details firm’s demise: Akimbo Systems went belly up last week as it tried to launch a video-on-demand service. An insider tells a story about the company’s collapse and blames it on the bad strategy of trying to charge for hardware, monthly subscriptions and content. The insider says that the company failed to get its new service on other boxes, such as Tivo or Windows Media Center.

New Mac OS X update fixes 70 bugs: The new Mac OS X 10.5.3 update fixes a bunch of bugs in the Leopard operating system. Apple says the update improves stability, security and compatibility. The Time Machine backup application is now more compatible with the Time Capsule hardware. A description of the fixes is available on PC World.

Abu Dhabi invests big in solar: Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Initiative puts $2 billion into its own thin-film startup. That’s the world’s largest single investment in solar, made by an emirate that is rich on the old source of energy, oil. The panels the company makes are expected to be used in Masdar City — a zero carbon, zero waste city — in Abu Dhabi.

 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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