Tuesday 28 October 2008

Intense Debate - End note

7 comments
I never planned to post about Intense Debate but since I have started I might as well finish. I have used Intense Debate on other blogs and think it is brilliant. A very clever solution and one that I completely missed when I was, not so long ago, looking a business opportunities in the blogging world. And it offers a way for using blogs as a proper alternative to forums, I really like that.

However as well as it works on WordPress blogs I might have suffered, possibly, from being an early adopter, trying this on Blogger quite a while back. The benefit is that if you get something like this working you have tomorrow's solution today, the danger is that it might take too much time to get working, if indeed you can at all. Now I am an early adopter in all sorts of ways and recognize this dichotomy. I do not blame Intense Debate for me taking that risk, then.

However, blogging, as interesting and fun as it is, is time consuming enough and I realize I just want to use what works and focus on content. Certainly Intense Debate would significantly help in this respect - if I was or were to become again a regular blogger and to have generated sufficient responses to my posts. Well this blog is not at that stage.

I am more than content with Blogger's embedded comments for now and only wish that other blogs I comment on such as say Alonzo Fyfe's, Stephen Law's, Richard Chappell's and Massimo Pigliucci's blogs - to name but four - would update theirs to suit. Oh Richard just did his this week, it was simple huh? In fact all those blogs would greatly benefit from installing Intense Debate, far more than mine would. Still, since Intense Debate are currently working on importing old comments from Blogger into Intense Debate, I cannot recommend it at this point in time. I hope when this is solved that Intense Debate will post a comment to this effect here.

Part of my annoyance was due to wanting to use a great product rather than rely on inferior solutions such as that provided by Blogger. Innovative companies like Intense Debate provide a great service in preventing big companies like Google and Microsoft from keeping us locked into their inertia as if that is the way it should be. How could I include Google in that last sentence? Well Google's way of managing Blogger seems to be an early (?) indication that it is indeed starting to follow the well trodden path of Microsoft of being an innovative follower rather than leader, or maybe it is just a mistaken blip in my radar, we shall see.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for pointing this out, I just switched RationallySpeaking.org to embedded comments.

Cheers,
Massimo

Anonymous said...

It's a pity you couldn't get it working correctly. Your blog with a variable width would work much better with it.
I hope I see you use it in the future.

I noticed that blogger implemented embedded comments but unfortunately they missed the point and their system simply requires too many clicks around to get correctly (and they still have the horrible captcha)

Martin Freedman said...

Does Blogger's comment system suck? Yes but far less so with embedded comments. Capcha is an option I have switched on or not switched off and I think is no big deal to do.

Plus most WordPress blogs were afflicted with no Preview function - unless I requested it - remember db0 ;-) This is what I think got you on the path of solving all your commenting problems and the solution you found, IntenseDebate is a good one...

So, is Intense Debate better? No argument there. However unless I get my blog going again regularly and get enough comments it is not with it for me. Secondly if I did have enough comment flow it cannot currently import those old comments into Intense Debate which would be a significant problem for any of the other blogs that I noted in this post

I do not see where there are too many clicks

Anonymous said...

Well, I did not intent to try and convince you here so I won't argue the point. I still believe that IDC is simply better because of the features such as the email notifications and the threading.

The many clicks are when I need to use OpenID to post where I get 2 out-of-focus popups before I can post.

Friar Zero said...

Have you tried Disqus? I have recently installed it on my blogger blog (with a two column version of the same template you have) and it is working fine. It also allows for threaded comments and e-mail notifications and was quick and easy to install (your mileage may vary).

Martin Freedman said...

Well just tried it and it did not work

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